Judges in UK No Longer Must Identify Publicly as Freemasons

By Tyler Marshall

(London, UK) – UK Justice Secretary Jack Straw has announced that judges will no longer have to publicly declare whether they are Freemasons when taking office. Straw also said that Parliament "made no finding of impropriety in the conduct of the judiciary arising from membership of individual members of the judiciary of the Freemasons.” That being said, what were the grounds for this legal action to begin with?

In 1998 Straw, then home secretary, said to the BBC that membership in “secret societies such as Freemasonry” may be a conflict of interest for judges and magistrates. Straw has now overturned this 11-year-rule, of which he introduced, after the European Court of Human Rights ruled the practice discriminatory.

In England and Wales there are 3,800 judges and 30,000 magistrates, six percent of which are Freemasons. Along with all the others, there are one million masons in Britain; so what finally brought this situation to public light?

A report from the House of Commons' home affairs committee in March 1997 said that “nothing so much undermines public confidence in public institutions as the knowledge that some public servants are members of a secret society one of whose aims is mutual self-advancement.”

The aim of any organization is self-advancement. This call to action by Straw had little to no legal standing, and it is amazing that the ruling stood at all, let alone for 11 years.

A senior Freemason from the United Grand Lodge of England, Pro Grand Master Farnham, said that the masons would hand over the names of sitting judges “only if forced by law.” He went on to tell the BBC that there was “no evidence even tending to show that Freemasons in general have perverted the course of justice".

In 2007 the European Court of Human Rights ruled in favor of Italian Masons in the cases of Grande Oriente d'Italia di Palazzo Guistiniani v Italy (no. 1) and Grande Oriente d'Italia di Palazzo Guistiniani v Italy (no. 2). The court found that forcing an official to declare membership in any organization is a breach of their right to free association.

The BBC reported Shaw saying that a review by the committee had shown no evidence of "impropriety or malpractice" as a result of a judge being a Freemason and that it would be "disproportionate" to continue with the practice. This statement is a complete 180 from his stance 11 years prior, when Straw required no real evidence to enact the law.

Anarchy in the UK

When this movement started in 1998 there was an attempt to push the same requirement on police officers, but the movement was dropped in favor of voluntary declarations. Other authorities in the UK also had the issue raised in court.

Thomas Monogue, who was facing a housebreaking charge in Scotland, used the argument in his defense. "A sheriff's membership of a masonic brotherhood infringes my human rights and damages the impartiality of the court," he said to the BBC in 2000.

In 2003 a man named Kourosh Etmad-Moghadam was arrested at a civil hearing in London after punching a judge. The BBC reported the prosecutor saying that Etmad-Moghadam became “more and more agitated as the judge delivered his ruling and demanded to know whether he was a Freemason.”

The BBC also quoted Etmad-Moghadam's attorney. "You deliberately provoked him and you and other members of the judiciary have conspired for years to rob him of his livelihood, his freedom, and have oppressed him,” she said to the judge.

Straw planted this idea of masonic conspiracy in the minds of the citizens of the United Kingdom. Even if the public did not truly believe in it, defendants sure used the idea in court in an attempt to fool the justice system.