Living with an immigration judge was never supposed to be a high-octane affair. But the humdrum of tribunal life was interrupted a few months ago when the threats started.
“We had to leave our home – we had less than 24 hours to get out,” the partner of one judge said. They called the police, stayed with friends, and tried to make sense of how their lives had been upended.
“It completely removes your feeling of security in your home,” the partner said. “You worry that your children will somehow get caught up in this. It turns your life upside down and nothing feels secure afterwards.”
The ordeal started after Robert Jenrick began a campaign highlighting what the shadow justice secretary described as “activist judges”. After months of news reports and feverish online rhetoric about immigration tribunal decisions, in April the Tory frontbencher began naming judges on social media. Jenrick pledged that under his regime, “biased judges will be sacked automatically” and at the Conservative party conferencelast month he revealed that he had compiled a list of more than 30 judges who he claimed had links to “open border charities”. His posts have been circulated among far-right groups online.
An Observer investigation has established that at least six immigration judges have been subjected to threats since April. At least two immigration judges have been advised to move out of their homes. Some have had their home addresses published on social media by far-right activists. One judge received a threat saying: “We know which bus your child catches”.
Judges are discouraged from speaking to the media, to maintain the independence of the judiciary, but family members and retired judges are not. The son of one judge says he has become so anxious about his parents’ safety that he calls them every day from university and uses the Find My iPhone app to track their movements.
Jane Coker, who spent 20 years as an immigration judge, said she was aware of a second judge who had been advised to move home.
“One of the judges had received a load of threats and went to [their] local police station and three hours later the police had installed panic buttons in [their] house,” she said. “It’s really quite serious. It’s scary stuff.”
The growth of threats has alarmed senior members of the judiciary. Lady Chief Justice Carr, England’s most senior judge, established a judicial security taskforce this year, with a remit to look at physical and online threats. Judges and magistrates in all courts will receive digital security training, and the taskforce is working with police.
In her annual report, Carr said: “Throughout the last year, judges have had to work in an increasingly challenging landscape: one which has included frequent policy changes and inaccurate and unfair criticism, sometimes personal, with associated security threats.”
The attorney general, Lord Hermer, is also concerned. “Recently, we've seen an increase in attacks on individual judges, accompanied by a significant rise in physical and online threats to members of the judiciary and their families,” a spokesman said. “That is totally unacceptable.” Although institutions should be accountable, the attacks and “toxic atmosphere” were “leading many to reconsider their careers”.
“It is never acceptable to put people's safety, families, or homes at risk,” said Barbara Mills KC, chair of the Bar. “We are deeply concerned by the targeting of lawyers and judges who serve our justice system and uphold democratic principles.
Criticism of judges is not new, but the tone of public debate darkened in 2016 when the Daily Mail used the headline “Enemies of the people” on its front page to describe three high court judges who had ruled that the government needed parliament’s approval to trigger the Article 50 Brexit process.
“Unelected judges” and “lefty lawyers” became epithets of choice for ministers in the May, Johnson and Sunak governments, and that rhetoric has filtered into public discourse on the right and left. Banksy’s latest work, sprayed on the wall of the Royal Courts of Justice in September, depicted a bewigged judge attacking a protester with a gavel. Historically, the British left was sceptical about judicial power, seeing it as an arm of the establishment, unevenly deployed, but much of the new pressure comes from the right.
During the anti-immigrant riots of 2024 following the Southport murders, far-right groups circulated a list of 36 targets, including immigration advice centres and solicitors working in residential homes. Last year, Cavan Medlock, a neo-Nazi, was detained indefinitely after launching a terror attack on an immigration law firm he chose after reading a Daily Mail article three days earlier. In the US, similar anti-judge rhetoric from Donald Trump has been blamed for record numbers of US Marshals investigations of threats against judges.
The new wave of attacks on judges by Jenrick, who as shadow lord chancellor many believe has a responsibility to safeguard the independence of the judiciary and rule of law, is also playing out behind the scenes via the judicial conduct investigations office, The Observer understands.
Jenrick or his staff are believed to have made complaints about alleged judicial misconduct relating to the judges on his list, without success so far.
Outcomes of JCIO complaints are not published unless they are upheld, but last year three complaints out of 100 were upheld against immigration tribunal judges.
At least two judges are believed to have taken legal advice about what potential action they could take against Jenrick.
Jenrick did not comment on these issues, but a spokesperson said: “Threats towards judges are vile and unacceptable. The perpetrators must face the full force of the law.
“That must not be confused with legitimate democratic scrutiny of judicial decisions. Attempting to link a politician’s policy arguments to anonymous criminal threats is a cheap tactic to shut down debate.
“The vast majority of judges are a credit to their profession. However, a small number of judges are bringing the independence of the judiciary into question. If judges make public political comments, against the guidance of the judiciary, they should expect to be held to account.”
The shadow lord chancellor was silent on whether the same risks around impartiality applied to those the right, including one of his predecessors. In 1998, Edward Garnier KC, then MP for Harborough and William Hague’s spokesman on the lord chancellor’s department, was appointed as a crown court judge.
Have judges made public political comments while serving as judges? The examples that Jenrick cited were all from barristers who had made statements on social media, often years before they became judges. The practice of trawling through online accounts, known as “offence archaeology”, has been decried by free speech advocates.
Jenrick, who has spoken out against cancel culture, used LinkedIn posts from 2016 and 2019 to question whether one judge was impartial in 2025. He posted on 13 November: “He's an immigration judge whose political opinions are public on his social media. He boasted he backed Remain in 2016 and bashed the Tories in 2019 – before wrongly applying post-Brexit laws to block deportations.”
Many of the attacks on judges are misleading, according to the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights at Oxford University, which analysed 379 news items relating to the ECHR, and found that 75% were about the immigration system.
The best-known is the case of Klevis Disha, which Jenrick characterised as “the Albanian criminal who couldn't be deported – because his son doesn't like the chicken nuggets in Albania – was allowed to stay because deporting him could violate his ECHR rights.”
‘If you’re constantly depicting your judges doing unimaginable, crazy things, this really undermines trust in the judicial system’
Prof Başak Çalı, Bonavero
What Jenrick did not mention was that the decision by a lower tribunal judge had been overturned on appeal, eight months before his comment, and Bonavero said the mention of chicken nuggets had not been the reason Disha’s deportation was stopped. Jenrick’s spokesman said that the judge’s actions had been “absurd” and appealing had cost taxpayers money.
Bonavero’s analysis of Home Office data showed that only 0.73% of successful appeals against deportation by foreign national offenders involved a human rights claim, in the 15 months to June 2021. The European Court of Human Rights has only ruled against the UK in immigration removals on 13 occasions since 1980, just four related to the right to family life, the institute found.
“If you’re constantly depicting your judges doing these kinds of unimaginable, crazy things, this really undermines trust in the judicial system, which has lots of layers of difficulties in a democratic society,” said Prof Başak Çalı, Bonavero’s head of research.
“Misrepresenting what the judges do presents serious risks for those judges, because the judges can only speak through their decisions.”
The independence of the judiciary may seem like a dry, abstract issue, but civil rights groups have warned that attacks on independent judges are part of a creeping authoritarianism. The Human Rights Foundation, a US-based watchdog, has highlighted several “disguised judicial attacks” including the arrests of hundreds of judges in Turkey after the failed 2016 coup, and the forced retirement of 300 judges in Hungary. Civicus Monitor, an international research collaboration, said last year the UK is a country where civic space is now “obstructed”.
It would be a concern to the late Lord Hailsham, a leading Conservative thinker. In 1976 Hailsham, then known as Quintin Hogg, warned that the powers of parliament were “absolute and unlimited”, making the UK an outlier among free nations.
“Parliament can take away a man’s liberty or his life without a trial,” he said. “We live in an elective dictatorship, absolute in theory, if hitherto thought tolerable in practice.”
Photograph by Rasid Necati Aslim/Anadolu via Getty Images