Senior judge says judicial independence faces growing pressure from political criticism, emerging AI risks and long-term pressures on the justice system
In a wide-ranging speech, Dame Victoria Sharp, President of the King’s Bench Division, has warned that judicial independence faces growing threats from political attacks, social media hostility, artificial intelligence and long-term pressures on court resources.
Addressing political pressure on the judiciary, Sharp highlighted concerns about increasing criticism of judges and courts in public debate. In 2025, the Attorney General publicly described political attacks on judges as “dangerous” and as “a huge threat to the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary,” after criticism migrated from social media onto the floor of the House of Commons itself.
The Lady Chief Justice, Baroness Carr of Walton-on-the-Hill, has separately raised her concerns before both the Constitution Committee and the Justice Select Committee.
Sharp emphasised that judicial independence is not a privilege enjoyed by judges but a constitutional safeguard designed to protect the public. She said courts must be free to decide cases according to the law and evidence rather than political pressure, public opinion or the interests of powerful individuals, warning that attacks on the judiciary risk undermining confidence in the rule of law. But it is artificial intelligence that occupies the speech’s most urgent passages.
The judge warns that courts are already grappling with a surge in AI-generated legal arguments, fabricated citations, and authorities that simply do not exist. Dealing with such material drains court resources and, more gravely, risks misleading both opposing parties and the court itself. The concern over deepfakes is equally stark. Synthetic audio, manipulated video, and cloned voices can now place a person at a location they never visited, or put words in their mouth they never spoke. Crucially, what once required specialist expertise can today be produced by an ordinary litigant using a smartphone.
The judge also raises the spectre of what is termed “system capture”, the risk that courts, growing dependent on a handful of proprietary AI systems updated invisibly and controlled externally, could find their judicial reasoning quietly compromised without any formal interference taking place.
Against this backdrop sit the raw figures of a system under strain. The Crown Court backlog stood at 80,203 open cases at the end of December 2025, more than double the 2019 figure. Over 21,000 cases had remained open for more than a year. Sharp noted findings cited by the House of Lords Constitution Committee that Ministry of Justice funding for HM Courts and Tribunals Service in 2019–20 was 21 percent lower in real terms than in 2010–11.
The judge is unequivocal: AI must not become a substitute for the public investment that justice genuinely requires. Efficiency metrics cannot be permitted to override the constitutional function of an independent judiciary. “Without fear or favour,” the judicial oath demands. That promise, the judge concludes, belongs not to judges, but to the public.