A high court judge has described the jurisdiction of the courts as "an absurdity". At the launch of a book on criminal law, Mr Justice Paul Carney said: "It seems an absurdity to me that I cannot, as a judge of the High Court, deal with a billion pound fraud - not because it is above my jurisdiction but because it is below it." The judge was describing the situation where the Central Criminal Court, the criminal division of the High Court, effectively only deals with murder and rape, and major frauds are dealt with in the circuit courts.
He explained that this arose from earlier abuse of the system whereby people could elect to be tried in the Central Criminal Court. "The legislature responded with a sledge-hammer," he said. "The Central Criminal Court was deprived of jurisdiction in all cases, save treason, piracy, genocide, murder and rape."
Because of the effective non-existence of the first three categories of crime, this meant that the court only dealt with murder and rape.
"People have been murdering and raping each other from time immemorial and these are accordingly very settled crimes. The more difficult areas are in fraud, money-laundering and the developing areas where forum-shopping is engaged in by international criminals," he said, yet these were beneath the jurisdiction of the High Court.
"We have in this country, in the past, a tradition in the fraud area of prosecuting little beyond the bent wages clerk but this culture I believe has changed and there is now a will to enforce the law.
"We are likely to be into substantially new forms of prosecutions including those arising as a consequence of tribunals and inspectorships, as well as developing European and domestic criminal law which go far beyond the stealing of a chocolate bar. It might be thought appropriate that the distribution of criminal jurisdictions should now be looked at," he said.
Mr Justice Carney was speaking at the launch of Criminal Law by Peter Charleton, Paul Anthony McDermott and Marguerite Bolger which was published by Butterworths on Wednesday.