Judicial Review: last stand for lawfulness

The "last resort" tool for administrative failure is absurdly heavy to wield

When I’m not confronting court-sanctioned child traffickers in America — my current main preoccupation — I return to my “day job” of holding corrupt officials in Britain to account. Right now, that means fighting a police force that won’t put its name to correspondence (Cumbria Constabulary), a court operating under a non-existent alias (Carlisle Magistrates’ Court), and a prosecution that refuses to confirm it followed the law in taking the case (Crown Prosecution Service).

Three simple “yes or no” questions lie at the heart of this:

1. Was there a lawful cause of action for the police to issue a charge?
   (Hint: no — but my motion to dismiss for lack of evidence was ignored.)

2. Does the court have jurisdiction to hear the matter?
   (Hint: nobody knows — but my abuse of process motion was brushed aside.)

3. Does the prosecution have standing to try the case?
   (Hint: almost certainly not — but my complaint about non-engagement got no meaningful reply.)

This isn’t a dispute over facts or guilt. It’s a binary matter: Is this court real? Do these officials have lawful authority? Did they follow procedure? All three questions have been met with institutional silence. That silence is an answer: to respond would risk self-incrimination; to attack me for asking would delegitimise themselves; to ignore me is a confession in all but name.

And so, I’m left with one remaining tool to force accountability: Judicial Review in the High Court.

You may have already read my Judicial Review Pre-Action Protocol (PAP) letter — a document met with total silence from the court. No acknowledgement, no reply, no defence. That alone is a breach of duty and protocol. It suggests bad faith — or worse. If my suspicion is correct, and the authorities are running “ghost courts” to enforce illegal Single Justice Procedure (SJP) fines, then we’re talking criminal fraud. The sums involved run into hundreds of millions per year. Who knows how many of those prosecutions are equally void?

My bundle for the High Court is nearly complete — over 150 pages in total — with just final checks and formatting left before submission. The absurdity? These reams of paperwork are required just to ask: “Do you have jurisdiction?” and “Are you allowed to prosecute me?” This could be resolved in a five-minute phone call. Instead, I’ve spent weeks navigating a labyrinth of legal logistics — across international borders, with no paid help, under live legal threat.

Here are just some of the hurdles I’ve had to clear:

• Decoding whether “Local Justice Areas” are lawful aliases or unlawful fictions.

• Documenting silence as evidence — what to include when no response is the response.

• Framing this not as a petty motoring complaint, but a constitutional matter of national importance.

• Synchronising multiple documents: Statement of Grounds, Application for Review, Draft Order, Exhibits.

• Working out unclear rules on formats, pagination, copies — often based on "court culture", not codified rules.

• Printing everything in A4 while based in the USA, where only US Letter paper is sold.

• Managing a 7-day deadline for serving all parties after filing, with international postage delay risks.

• Creating multiple complete physical bundles — while staying in a house with an adversarial party I believe to be complicit in child trafficking.

• Establishing correct legal addresses for a “court” that doesn’t officially exist.

• Filing a separate Statement of Service after serving papers — just one of many procedural “gotchas”.

• Deciding how much of the correspondence trail to include, and what can be omitted without risk.

• Estimating exposure to costs — a serious concern for a self-funded litigant.

• Conforming to the rigid fields and character limits of the N461 Judicial Review application form.

• Balancing multiple deadlines, other court matters, international travel, and redirected post from the UK.

• Navigating the administrative chaos between the SJPN and Summons — separate domains, one failure.

• Turning a wall of procedural stonewalling into admissible evidence of administrative abuse.

• Assembling digital documents from emails, PDFs, screenshots into a single indexed bundle with bookmarks — something I’ve never done before.

• Absorbing Part 54/54A procedure rules, which rival a desert for dryness.

• Avoiding minor mistakes (like missing signature blocks) that could invalidate the filing.

• Relying on AI for legal references and document generation — I lack a law library or research team.

• Tracking when the High Court assigns its own case number and how this affects the paperwork trail.

Any ordinary person with a family and job would be crushed by this process before it even begins. I am highly educated, technically adept, legally experienced, financially supported by donors, and still — it is barely survivable. This is a system designed not to deliver justice, but to ensure that accountability remains inaccessible. The bureaucrats on the other side are paid to remain silent. I must bear the full cost of challenging them. That is not “access to justice”; that is systemic obstruction.

Any other sector would have streamlined this by now. There would be a digital portal, not a bundle. There would be standard validation of court identities and prosecutorial standing. There would be a helpdesk, not a void. But the justice system has no incentive to make the truth discoverable. Complexity is its shield. Obscurity is its fortress.

Judicial Review is supposed to scrutinise official decisions. But my case is more fundamental: I am demanding that the Crown explain who is acting, by what authority, and with what lawful mandate. These are not "controversial" matters — they are the basics of civil society. Yet the only way to ask is via a £1,000+ logistical and legal nightmare, with no guaranteed hearing and no obligation to even be taken seriously.

As a computer scientist, I find the system grotesque. It’s like a software platform with no documentation, broken interfaces, hidden APIs, and silent error traps. Why aren’t all court names verifiable via QR codes? Why don’t legal documents have persistent URLs? Why aren’t preconditions and postconditions clearly defined like in software contracts? Law as practiced is an 1800s process held together by habit and the hope that nobody looks too closely.

My father worked in aviation. A process this opaque would get people killed in that domain. Yet we accept it in the justice system — a place where liberty, finances, and reputations are on the line — because the myth of “due process” papers over procedural abuse.

How can there even be a question about whether the court trying me exists? Why is it even possible for the CPS to file charges with no proof of standing? If I, with all my advantages, cannot extract answers to these elementary legal queries, then the system is not merely broken — it is engineered to fail those it claims to serve.

So I will continue. Whether or not this motoring case ever reaches trial is now immaterial. My true trial is one of endurance and integrity — confronting a system that has abandoned both. If the High Court refuses to hear my application, then that, too, becomes part of the record. If it does, and justice prevails, it may open the floodgates to mass accountability.

Either way, this essay — and the process it documents — is evidence. Until bureaucrats fear the spirit of treason — for that is what the destruction of our constitution truly is — they will continue to perpetrate procedural violence with impunity.

AI Disclosure: I wrote a first draft by hand, but am posting the ChatGPT tightened-up version as it is more effective in getting the message over.

Living waters near the Natchez Trace Parkway, Tennessee.