The law 'is not a value-free zone'

The law is not a "value-free zone", nor has it become "amoral or even immoral", Mr Justice Singh has argued.

Singh J, who as Rabinder Singh became the first Sikh High Court judge in 2011, said the Human Rights Act was a "good guide, if not an exhaustive one" to what society regarded as fundamental values.

He said other statutes which proclaimed fundamental values were the Equality Act 2010, which replaced earlier anti-discrimination legislation.

Delivering the Jan Grodecki lecture at the University of Leicester, Singh J said it was reasonable to suggest that our legal system was based on certain values, "well-established in its bedrock".

He went on: "Without attempting an exhaustive list I think that most observers of our legal system would acknowledge that its values include the concepts of fairness, equality, democracy and the rule of law.

"Although the law does not any longer attempt (or even think that it should attempt) to enforce morals in the sense that Lord Devlin thought it should 50 years ago, that is not to say that the law is immoral or even amoral.

"It is based on values, which lie at its foundations, but one of those values is that we do not necessarily think it right to impose a subjective code of private or sexual morality on an individual.

"Our legal system now recognises, as the Wolfenden Report suggested in 1957, and as Professor Hart advocated in the early 1960s, that there are some things which are none of the state's business, such as homosexual acts between consenting adults in private."

Mr Justice Singh said the law had "turned 180 degrees" on the issue.

"What was criminalised until 1967 has become the subject of a fundamental human right, in particular as a result of the Human Rights Act.

"The right to respect for private life in Article 8 includes a power of autonomy over many decisions which are intrinsic to a human being's personality, for example consensual sexual relationships.

"This does not mean that the law has become a value-free zone. Far from it. It means that the values of the law are now different from what they were 50 years ago."