IN his defence of Lord Hain for using parliamentary privilege contrary to the terms of a court injunction, AV Martin (Letters November 13) makes one assertion that is at best questionable and one that is simply wrong, albeit widely believed.

The questionable assumption is that we have come to adopt ‘the continental system of rule by judges at all levels’. If he is suggesting that judges routinely base their decisions on political considerations, I would challenge him to provide some examples. My whole experience of the law over more than 50 years is that they do no such thing and are very aware of the necessity not only to avoid doing so but to avoid any appearance of doing so.

Parliament, however, does not always make their life easier by legislating in a way that obliges them to adjudicate on increasingly politicised issues where they are bound to attract criticism from one or other end of the political spectrum whatever they decide. These may have political consequences but that does not make them ‘political’ decisions.

His wrongful assertion is to suggest that Napoleonic-inspired ‘continental’ criminal law jurisdictions with their origin in Roman law have somehow reversed the presumption of ‘innocent until proven guilty’.

There is a fundamental difference between our ‘accusatorial’ procedure for conducting criminal trials and the continental ‘inquisitorial’ procedure. Unfortunately, this is widely misunderstood in this country. Few law-abiding people after all have any reason to be familiar with continental legal systems, so this curious myth persists.

Tony Lawton,

Skelton, York