Leonard Hubert "Lenny" Hoffmann, Baron Hoffmann, PC (賀輔明勳爵) (born 1934 in Cape Town, South Africa) is a senior British judge, serving as a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary.
Born into a Jewish family near Cape Town, Lord Hoffmann was the son of a well-known solicitor. He was educated at the University of Cape Town and then attended The Queen's College, Oxford, as a Rhodes scholar. He studied for the BCL, thought by many to be the leading graduate law degree in the common law world, where he won the Vinerian Scholarship. After being called to the Bar, he became one of the most sought after and highly-priced barristers of his generation and was quickly made a judge.
In 1995 Hoffmann was appointed a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary and thereby created a life peer by the title of Baron Hoffmann, of Chedworth in the County of Gloucestershire.
His failure to declare his links with Amnesty International before ruling on whether General Pinochet was immune from prosecution led to the unprecedented setting aside of a House of Lords judgment. He later went on to comment "The fact is I'm not biased. I am a lawyer. I do things as a judge. The fact that my wife works as a secretary for Amnesty International is, as far as I am concerned, neither here nor there," he told the Daily Telegraph newspaper.
Hoffmann is a non-permanent judge of Hong Kong SAR Court of Final Appeal.
Opinions in Terrorism Cases and Controversies
Lord Hoffmann was involved in three important landmark judgements of the House of Lords. The first was SSHD v Rehman [2001 UKHL 47], the second was A v SSHD [2004 UKHL 56] and the third was A v SSHD [2005 UKHL 71]. In SSHD v Rehman, at para-62, he wrote, "Postscript. I wrote this speech some three months before the recent events in New York and Washington. They are a reminder that in matters of national security, the cost of failure can be high. This seems to me to underline the need for the judicial arm of government to respect the decisions of ministers of the Crown on the question of whether support for terrorist activities in a foreign country constitutes a threat to national security. It is not only that the executive has access to special information and expertise in these matters. It is also that such decisions, with serious potential results for the community, require a legitimacy which can be conferred only by entrusting them to persons responsible to the community through the democratic process. If the people are to accept the consequences of such decisions, they must be made by persons whom the people have elected and whom they can remove." It appeared that he was willing to defer to the executive in matters concerning national security in the fairly long tradition of English Judges deferring to the executive in such matters, including Lord Denning in ex-parte Hosenball. However, shortly, when for all practical purposes, UK faced worse threats from terrorists on its homeland than in 2001 at the time that he wrote his speech in the Rehman case, Lord Hoffmann, took a lone dissentient stand against the government/ executive in A v SSHD [2004 UKHL 56] or what has subsequently been known eponymously as the Belmarsh case. In this case, Lord Hoffman wrote at para-97 that, "The real threat to the life of the nation, in the sense of a people living in accordance with its traditional laws and political values, comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these. That is the true measure of what terrorism may achieve. It is for Parliament to decide whether to give the terrorists such a victory." These conflictual stands of his are puzzling. In A v SSHD [2005 UKHL 71], known eponymously by its chief subject matter, torture, as the Torture Case, Lord Hoffmann rhetoricised, "The use of torture is dishonourable. It corrupts and degrades the state which uses it and the legal system which accepts it."
Selected list of cases decided
SSHD v Rehman [2001 UKHL 47] [1] A v SSHD [2004 UKHL 56] [2] A v SSHD [2005 UKHL 71] [3]
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