When Justice Goes Missing: Untraceable Tribunals, Human Rights, and the Case for Returning Unlawful Fines in England’s Magistrates’ Courts

In recent years, administrative changes—especially the Single Justice Procedure—have transformed summary justice in England and Wales. The official JCS guidance (August 2025) dismisses concerns about ambiguous court names and process errors as “mere surplusage.” However, this position raises serious constitutional issues that demand institutional reflection and reform. As a compliance analyst and systems engineer, engaging with reform advocates such as Martin Geddes, I respectfully submit this open letter for the JCS’s urgent consideration.

Overview of Martin Geddes’ Work

Martin Geddes’ legal investigations have focused on the structural and constitutional weaknesses of the UK’s summary justice system, particularly regarding the Single Justice Procedure (SJP), court identity, and human rights. Through public FOI requests, extensive legal citation, and detailed analysis, Geddes raises fundamental concerns about:

• The lack of clear, statutory identification of many tribunals issuing fines and orders, creating the risk of “untraceable” or fictitious courts.

• The administrative substitution of data labels or justice areas for properly established courts, eroding the public’s ability to verify the lawful authority behind coercive state action.

• The practical and constitutional dangers this poses for fairness, proportionality, and fundamental rights, especially as more minor infractions (such as parking or speeding tickets) are handled through opaque or automated processes.

• The need for greater transparency, legal scrutiny, and accountability within the magistrates’ courts system, to ensure compliance with the Human Rights Act and restore public trust.

Geddes’s work is widely referenced in discussions on legal reform and has prompted institutional responses, including the recent JCS guidance.

Ministry of Justice proposes to abolish habeas corpus (unless we stop them)

In August 2025, the Justices’ Legal Advisers’ and Court Officers’ Service (JCS) issued new guidance addressing “pseudo-legal” challenges to magistrates’ court proceedings based on naming errors, local justice area titles, and alleged procedural defects. The guidance asserts that:

• Magistrates’ courts derive their authority from the justices themselves, not the name or status of any particular building or administrative unit.

• Errors or omissions in the naming of courts or local justice areas on summonses or requisitions do not invalidate proceedings.

• Process defects, provided essential elements are met, are “surplusage” and cured by statutory provisions such as section 123 of the Magistrates’ Courts Act 1980.

This guidance responds directly to the types of legal and procedural objections raised by Geddes and others, who warn that such administrative practices risk breaching fundamental rights and undermining lawful authority if left unexamined. The current debate centres on how to balance administrative efficiency with the constitutional necessity of clear, legal, and public accountability in the exercise of judicial power.

Geddes provides a copy of the JCS guidance “Challenges to legality based on court names, LJA titles, and alleged errors in magistrates’ courts”, August 2025, which is available here: Jurisdiction-LJAs-Courthouses-myths-August-2025-san.pdf

Below is my open letter to JCS prepared in dialogue with Perplexity AI, which I will bring to the attention of this professional body for lawyers who advise magistrates, for a response.

Open Letter to the Justices’ Legal Advisers’ and Court Officers’ Service (JCS)

Re: Guidance on Court Names, LJA Titles, and Errors in Magistrates’ Court Process

Dear Justices’ Legal Advisers,

I write in response to your August 2025 memorandum, "Challenges to legality based on court names, LJA titles, and alleged errors in process in magistrates’ courts," to bring urgent attention to serious legal, constitutional, and operational risks exposed by your current guidance.

1. Tribunal Identity, Human Rights, and IT Security

Your guidance asserts that court names are "mere surplusage," with tribunal identity determined administratively—even by IT labels or codes—rather than rooted in statute or public registry. This position departs from long-established legal safeguards. Article 6 ECHR, incorporated in UK law by the Human Rights Act 1998, mandates that justice be administered only by tribunals "established by law," identifiable and open to scrutiny.

In the present technological environment, this policy is not merely administratively expedient—it creates new and acute legal and security vulnerabilities. When the authority to issue fines, warrants, or other coercive orders is defined solely through an IT system, the justice process becomes exposed to increasingly sophisticated internal and external cyber threats. The creation, modification, or deletion of court entities, IT labels, or case routing is always at risk of manipulation—by hackers or bad actors within the system—potentially enabling fraudulent fines, void orders, and even covert operations beyond judicial oversight.

Should the public’s ability to verify tribunal authority depend only on the integrity of a database, any compromise—whether technical error or deliberate abuse—could result in irreparable miscarriages of justice. Our courts must be more than a mutable IT entry.

I am committed to the integrity and effectiveness of the magistrates’ courts. The guidance as it stands, however, may unintentionally weaken necessary legal safeguards.

2. The Practical Harm: Loss of Proportionality and Trust

Public concern is growing as fines for modest regulatory breaches—often processed under the Single Justice Procedure—are enforced in an increasingly automated and opaque manner, removed from direct judicial oversight. This distrust is not merely anecdotal; it is echoed in calls for reform from legal bodies, consumer advocates, and Parliament.

Your guidance maintains that process and naming errors do not “vitiate” judicial proceedings if procedural elements are present. However, in practice, this tolerance enables fines for lower-tier, largely technical infractions—such as bus lane incursions or minor speed limit breaches at sites with unclear signage—that rarely involve real harm but incur substantial, automatic penalties. Often, those affected are denied the opportunity to simply pay the regular cost (for example, road usage and parking fees) and instead face disproportionate financial sanctions for non-dangerous administrative violations.

Such enforcement, when carried out by tribunals whose legal authority may not be independently verifiable, intensifies concerns about the fairness and integrity of the system. These are not isolated cases, but systemic risks amplified daily by opaque, automated processes.

Extracting fines through database-driven, rather than duly constituted, tribunals undermines both proportionality and individuals’ right to an effective remedy. Ultimately, it erodes the constitutional order and diminishes public confidence in the justice system.

3. Remedy: Accountability and Reform

To safeguard both human rights and operational security, you must:

• Require every tribunal exercising summary jurisdiction to be statutorily constituted, publicly listed, and independently verifiable at all times;

• Audit and review all orders, fines, and warrants issued under ambiguous, IT-determined, or untraceable tribunal labels and return fines extracted through void acts;

• Immediately revise guidance and administrative practices to ensure process integrity and constitutional compliance—before case law or cyber threats force action through crisis, not reason.

These proposals are not obstacles to efficient justice, but essential conditions for maintaining the public’s trust, the health of the legal system, and the rule of law in an era of rapid digital transformation.

I urge the JCS and Ministry of Justice to act swiftly and collaboratively, ensuring that digital innovation supports—not supplants—our constitutional and human rights commitments.

Yours sincerely,
Alison Wright, BSc MSc
Systems Engineer