CARSWELL, Rt Hon Lord PC (1934-2023)
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Lord Carswell, judge who presided in Northern Ireland’s ‘Diplock courts’, which operated without a jury – obituary
‘The non-jury trial judge is on his own,’ he said. ‘It’s very testing. It’s very tiring’
Lord Carswell, who has died aged 88, was Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland from 1997 to 2004, and for 20 years presided over “Diplock courts”, trying terrorist cases without a jury….
Robert Douglas Carswell was born on June 28 1934 to Alan and Nance Carswell and was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution and Pembroke College, Oxford, where he graduated with Firsts in Mods and jurisprudence in 1956. Two years later he graduated from the University of Chicago Law School.
Called to the Bar of Northern Ireland in 1957 and later, in 1972, to the English Bar by Gray’s Inn, he served as Counsel to the Attorney-General for Northern Ireland in 1970–71, taking silk in 1971.
From 1974 to 1984 he was Senior Crown Counsel in Northern Ireland, in which capacity he represented the Northern Ireland Office at the inquest into the deaths of 10 Provisional IRA and INLA hunger-strikers at the Maze prison.
In March 1984, a day before taking up his appointment as a High Court judge in Northern Ireland, he spotted a bomb attached to his car in the driveway of his home. It was subsequently defused….
In 1992 Carswell was appointed a Lord Justice of Appeal at the Supreme Court in Northern Ireland. When he succeeded Sir Brian Hutton as Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland, an unnamed source quoted in Lawyer magazine described him as “a lawyer’s lawyer”, adding: “He has a sharp brain and he tends to be one step ahead of counsel. He runs a tight ship in court and is admired, rather than liked, for that. Sometimes it can be a challenge to appear before him.”
When Carswell was appointed a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary (Law Lord) in 2004, Marcel Berlins in The Guardian recalled that there had been suggestions that his role in a constitutional controversy of 2000 might have scuppered his promotion prospects.
This was a reference to a row over two nationalist barristers who had been appointed QCs but had refused to swear an oath of allegiance to the Queen. When Carswell refused to allow them to practise as QCs unless they made the declaration, the pair took the case to judicial review in the Northern Ireland high court and won. The judge who ruled against Carswell on that occasion, Sir Brian Kerr, succeeded him as Northern Ireland Lord Chief Justice.
Carswell was knighted in 1988, sworn of the Privy Council in 1993 and served on the cross-benches of the House of Lords until his retirement from the upper house in 2019….
Lord Carswell married Romayne Ferris in 1961. She survives him with two daughters.
Lord Carswell, born June 28 1934, died May 4 2023