Illusion of Progress? How the Backlash Against Woman’s Rights is Shaping Court Reforms in the United Kingdom.

Despite decades of legal progress, recent backlash against women’s rights in the United Kingdom is influencing court reforms in ways that may undermine gender equality.

Over the past few decades, the United Kingdom has often been viewed as a leader in advancing women’s rights. However, behind this theory of development, there is a growing negative response that is reshaping the priorities of law and policy. This raises an important question: are current court reforms reinforcing equality, or quietly reversing it?

As ‘Amnesty International’ points out, the loss of women's rights and protections is part of a broader global trend and problem. It manifests itself not only in political decisions, but also in systemic changes. What is particularly disturbing is that this increasingly impacts not only direct regulations concerning women's rights, but also the functioning of the institutions intended to protect them.

One of the key areas where these changes can be observed is the justice system. Although formally many countries (including the United Kingdom) have extensive mechanisms for protecting human rights, reports from international organizations show that their practical functioning remains far from ideal. Access to justice is often unequal, and women (especially victims of violence) have to face institutional, procedural and social barriers that significantly hinder their exercise of rights. In this context, the proposed judicial reforms in the UK are particularly significant, including limiting the role of juries in certain proceedings. The reforms were suggested back in 2024 by retired Court of Appeal judge Sir Brian Leveson, in response to a request by Lord Chancellor David Lammy to come up with a solution to the backlog in the courts. Supporters of the changes argue that they are intended to increase the system's efficiency and address the growing backlog of cases. However, according to numerous human rights and women's rights organizations, this approach could lead to unintended, but serious consequences. 

Juries play a crucial role not only as a procedural element, but also as a mechanism for democratic oversight of the justice system. Reducing juries effectively shifts greater responsibility to judges, which, given existing structural inequalities, could lead to deepening disparities in the treatment of specific social groups. For women, especially those who are victims of violence, this could mean an even more difficult path to justice.

Lawyers march on parliament in protest of government plan to limit jury trials (Source: ITV News)

Analyzing these changes in a broader context, it's hard to ignore their connection to the global trend of diminishing women's rights described by Amnesty International. Reforms that at first glance appear "technical" and "organizational" in nature may in fact be part of a deeper process of transforming legal systems in ways that, consciously or unconsciously, weaken protection for the most vulnerable groups.

At the same time, it is worth noting that from the government's point of view, the proposed changes are not dictated solely by ideological assumptions or the desire to rebuild the system, but are also a response to very specific structural problems. For years, the UK has struggled with growing court backlogs, political pressure to improve the efficiency of public institutions, and rising costs of the justice system. In this context, reforms are often presented as part of a broader "efficiency state" logic, where the state seeks to maximize operational efficiency with limited resources. However, critics point out that this approach can lead to simplifying systemic problems and ignoring their social consequences. Critics of the proposed changes point out that the problem of court overload, which is supposed to justify the reforms, is primarily structural. This is due to long-term financial shortages, staff shortages and the growing number of cases, and not to the model of conducting proceedings itself. In this sense, limiting the role of juries may prove to be a false solution - one that simplifies procedures but fails to address the real causes of the crisis. Moreover, there are concerns that the pursuit of increased efficiency may come at the expense of the quality of judgments and the sense of social justice.

This is particularly important in the context of cases involving violence against women. Many victims already refrain from pursuing their rights in court, citing the length of proceedings, the stress associated with the process, and a lack of trust in the institution. Introducing changes that could further limit their sense of influence over the course of the case (for example, by eliminating the participation of a jury) could exacerbate this problem. As a result, there is a risk that formally existing protection mechanisms will remain inaccessible to many women in practice.

It's also worth noting that the impact of judicial reforms on women's situation isn't limited solely to their role as victims. In some cases, women themselves become parties in criminal proceedings, for example, in situations involving self-defence against domestic violence. In such cases, social context and an individual's history play a crucial role in assessing the events. The presence of a jury representing the broader community can help provide a more nuanced perspective on such cases than when a judge alone makes the decision.

Looking at the system as a whole, these changes are part of a broader process that aims to further concentrate power in one place. This means that efficiency and institutional control are becoming more important than citizen participation. While this trend may seem justified in the face of growing caseloads and limited resources, it raises important questions about how to reconcile efficiency with procedural fairness.

Throughout the years, we can see from a perspective of many countries around the world, not only the UK, how reforms are intended to improve the system's operation may actually lead to its further distancing from citizens, especially those most vulnerable to exclusion. If these changes deepen existing inequalities (including gender inequalities), they will hardly be considered a real step forward. An analysis of the situation in the UK, therefore, shows that contemporary challenges to protecting women's rights increasingly stem not from overt restrictions on those rights, but from more subtle institutional transformations. It is precisely these changes, often presented as neutral or necessary, that may constitute a modern "backslash," which not only abolishes existing regulations, but also gradually weakens their effectiveness.

The debate surrounding judicial reforms in the UK, however, demonstrates that the proposed changes are not being accepted uncritically - on the contrary, they are met with clear resistance from both the legal community and sections of the political class. There are growing voices arguing that limiting the role of juries not only fails to solve systemic problems, but may actually worsen them. It's worth noting that the lack of consensus is evident even within the government itself, further undermining the narrative about the necessity and unequivocal effectiveness of the proposed reforms.

Rape Crisis England Wales (Source: JustGiving Blog)

In response to criticism, alternative proposals have also emerged, such as the creation of specialized sexual offense courts. While these solutions are presented as an attempt to increase the system's efficiency and respond to the needs of victims, their implementation raises further questions, including whether they will further segment the justice system and whether they will actually improve the situation of women or merely create the appearance of reform. Organizations specializing in human rights and legal analysis have a particularly important voice in this debate. An article by The Guardian points out that women are more likely to choose jury trials, meaning that the proposed changes could disproportionately affect this group. At the same time, the organization emphasizes the lack of convincing evidence that limiting jury participation will actually help address the backlog in courts. Moreover, analyses indicate that such measures may only have marginal effects, reducing the load on the system by only a few percent. Similar concerns are expressed by a broad coalition of organizations working to combat violence against women, including the ‘End Violence Against Women Coalition’. More than thirty organizations have warned that the proposed reforms could "undermine justice" in cases of violence, particularly for women victims of abuse. Importantly, they highlight not only the position of women as victims, but also as accused, for example in cases where self-defence against domestic violence leads to them being brought to court. In such situations, the opportunity to present a case to a jury can be crucial to understanding it within the broader social context.

Analyzing these issues from a broader perspective, it is important to point out the international human rights context. Organizations such as ‘Equality Now’ are focused on pointing out that the current backlash against women's rights is not only social in nature, but also institutional and legal. This means that changes in legislative and judicial systems, even if presented as neutral, may be part of a broader process of limiting the effective protection of women's rights. In turn, the United Nations Human Rights Office emphasizes that states, including the United Kingdom, have an obligation to provide equal protection to all citizens and to uphold international human rights standards. This raises questions about whether the proposed reforms fully meet these obligations.

The current debate is not an isolated phenomenon. Similar proposals have been made before, including in the context of reforms in Scotland, where the introduction of non-jury trials for sexual offenses was considered. However, these proposals were met with significant criticism and ultimately not implemented in their original form. 

All these elements, including the lack of clear evidence of the effectiveness of the reforms, opposition from expert circles, alternative proposals, and the international context strengthen the thesis that we are dealing not so much with a real improvement in the functioning of the system, but with a superficial reorganisation. In this sense, the proposed changes can be seen as an example of "apparent progress" that fails to address key issues and, in some cases, may even worsen them. Ultimately, from an analytical perspective, it's hard to resist the impression that what is presented as a reform that will increase the efficiency of the justice system, may be merely an attempt to manage the crisis by delaying it, rather than resolving it. The scale of the UK court backlog is not a marginal or technical problem, but rather a symptom of a deeper institutional failure that cannot be remedied by selectively reducing one element of the system.

In this light, limiting the role of juries appears not as a groundbreaking modernization, but as a solution that only addresses a narrow segment of the entire mechanism, without fixing the main causes of overload. The lack of clear evidence of the effectiveness of such measures, combined with the clear opposition from legal communities and human rights organizations, undermines the narrative of their real necessity and long-term usefulness.

However, the broader dimension of these changes remains most concerning. In a system already struggling with excessively long proceedings and declining public trust, reform should, above all, rebuild a sense of justice and transparency. However, the proposed solutions could have the opposite effect, further isolating citizens from justice institutions and causing people to lose faith that the system works for them, not just for statistics.

If reform simply shifts problems rather than solving them, the real question is: who benefits from the false solution? Therefore, the fundamental question that should be asked in the current situation is not how to limit the size of juries, but whether the British justice system is not gradually losing its fundamental character - moving from a citizen-based system to a system of purely administrative management of criminal cases.

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