Ruth Charteris KC

Speaking at an In Conversation event hosted by Holyrood magazine during the Interpol General Assembly in Glasgow this week, Charteris said she had fallen into the law by chance after tagging along to a University of Glasgow open day with one of her friends.

“I stumbled into law because my best friend at school, Gillian, was one of those really clever people who got five As and the world was her oyster,” Charteris recalled.
“We went to a Glasgow University open day because we got a day off school and she went to the medicine faculty then dragged me to the law faculty. One of the lecturers had been chatting to Gillian and then turned to me and said ‘what about you – do you not fancy doing law?’. He just took an interest in me and teased it out of me and I left thinking ‘yeah, I really do want to do law and actually I think I can do it’. So really it was down to a pretty lovely lecturer who bothered to speak to me.”

Education was hugely important to Charteris’s parents, with her father, who had grown up in Paisely and left school at 15 to work in the local mills, choosing to go to university when he was in his 40s so he could change career and become a social worker. That role saw him work mainly with people with addictions while Charteris’s mother, an auxiliary nurse, spent much of her working life in the Glasgow Royal Maternity Hospital on Rottenrow. Given their influence, it is perhaps unsurprising that by the time she went to university herself, Charteris made the decision to focus on public law.

“I began in 1991 when human rights were just beginning to burst on the scene,” she recalled. “The Human Rights Act wasn’t passed until 1998 but the European Court of Human Rights was beginning to make a difference and to make an impact on society, with corporal punishment being banned.

“I had the privilege of going to Alabama when I finished my fourth year at university and I worked with an organisation called the Equal Justice Initiative, which was about tackling the unequal administration of justice between black and white people. As part of that we worked on death penalty cases when they reached the appeal stage.”

One case that really stuck in her mind, she said, was that of a 15-year-old school boy who had been convicted of murdering one of his classmates. While the case had a racial element – the boy convicted was black while the boy who had been killed was white – she said a newspaper clipping in the case file really brought home to her the complicated and nuanced nature of justice.

“In the clipping was [a photo] of the mum of the victim hugging the mum of the now-convicted boy and both of them were essentially recognising that they were each going through a horrific experience and they had each lost a son,” she said.

Asked whether the fact she is a member of the socially conservative Free Church of Scotland had coloured her views on justice and the death penalty in particular, Charteris said her faith has always been hugely important to her and had been an influence throughout her career.

“Most of the people I met [in America] thought I was off my head because at the church I attended they all thought ‘oh she’s involved in this death-penalty project’ and the people at the death-penalty project thought ‘what on earth is she going to church for’, but I think I could be pretty objective and did try to see it from all different perspectives,” she said.

“Growing up, I may not have heard much about law or lawyers, but I certainly heard a lot about justice and about accountability. Lady Cosgrove, who was the first female judge [in Scotland], came from a Jewish background and she very much spoke about how she could relate to so much of what is pictured in the Bible about justice and justice ‘rolling down like waters’. For my own part, the death penalty is a very nuanced and difficult subject. I don’t think there’s necessarily a Biblical warrant for it, but I do believe in justice and part of that has to be accountability.”

Since becoming lord advocate in 2021 Bain, who Charteris deputises for as solicitor general, has put an increasingly sharp focus on how women are treated by a justice system that was designed by men to deal with violent male offenders. Charteris, who has spent much of her career as a prosecutor, said it can be particularly difficult having to hold women to account for breaking the law once the story behind their offending becomes clear.

“A couple of years ago I was involved in a women’s justice initiative with representatives from justice from all over Scotland – prisons, police, justice, the prosecution service – and one part of our report dealt with women offenders and women in prison and it was an absolutely fascinating case study,” she said.

“It’s a complex picture, but what we discovered was that women in prison [have] a very complex relationship with abuse. There’s also a real mental health issue going on there and evidence of head injuries in an astonishing number of women inmates. It’s a complex picture that impacts on families and one of the areas that really needs looked at is alternatives to incarceration.”

Bain has spoken several times about being motivated to become lord advocate so she could play an active role in improving notoriously low conviction rates in sexual offences cases. At the end of October the Appeal Court issued a ruling saying it agreed with her that the rules around corroboration should be updated so that statements made by a victim in the immediate aftermath of an offence can be used as evidence rather than insisting on the requirement that two separate witnesses are needed to convict.

However, plans to run a pilot scheme to assess whether juryless trials could lead to an improvement in conviction rates – something Bain was in favour of – have been dropped by the Scottish government in the wake of widespread opposition from the legal profession. Though she said she understands why the plan has been shelved, Charteris noted that on one view juryless trials would have been beneficial to the accused because they would have made it easier for anyone convicted to launch an appeal.

“The conviction rate for rape hovers at about 48 to 51 per cent, but that disguises the fact that in the case of single-complainer, single-accused rapes – often that’s acquaintance rapes - it’s down to as low as 24 per cent,” she said. “That’s against a normal conviction rate of about 88 per cent. We are working hard to address it within the prosecution service.”

Juryless trials would, she said, have been “a good thing – not a panacea, but a good thing”.

“It was one of the recommendations in Lady Dorrian’s review [of the management of sexual offences cases],” she continued. “The numbers [on the review group] were divided, but it was one of the recommendations to have a pilot and I think if that’s a recommendation they are making, they know what they’re talking about. It would have been interesting to see [the outcome of the pilot] and what I always thought was that, from the accused’s point of view, if the judge was convicting they would need to provide a reasoned opinion for why. When a jury convicts you never know why but in the pilot the judge would have given their full reasons so therefore it would be easier to appeal. I knew it was controversial and difficult and I absolutely understand the reasons why people were opposed. I get that.”

In terms of her own career, Charteris said she hopes the example she, Bain and Smith are setting will encourage other women to pursue their careers right to the top of the profession, though she acknowledged that it has not always been an easy path getting to where she is today.

“I can only really speak for myself and my experience, but there have been times I was treated less favourably because I was a woman, but I can’t overplay that or overstate that because it’s nothing compared to [what] others [have experienced] and at times it’s been a positive advantage to be a woman,” she said.

“I do look back and think probably, for me, the most difficult area was having children. That was really difficult. I was at the bar at the time so was self-employed and those were the days when, even though you were out to here with a baby about to be born, you had to ask the dean of faculty for permission to be absent during term time. I was never quite sure what I’d have done if he said no, but thankfully I was allowed to be absent to attend the maternity hospital. But there was no maternity pay and no maternity leave and when you came back there was no support.

“Having little ones, it was one almighty struggle to ever get to work anything resembling part-time. There were no allowances made in terms of the time that consultations were set for and a judge, quite rightly concerned with the efficiency of the justice programme, would certainly never have any thoughts about how I would make it back home to rescue my children from the nursery. Has there been institutional misogyny within the criminal justice system? I’m sure many women would say yes, but I think some of the women who are judges now were the trailblazers who made it easier for us.”