Addressing the 2023 Legal Wales Conference in Cardiff this week, Dame Sue Carr, LCJ said ‘linguistic access to justice is quite simply inherent in the right to a fair trial’. She highlighted that any party has a right to use the Welsh language, and suggested that artificial intelligence tools could be used to promote Welsh language accessibility in court, and could be used ‘to facilitate media access in Welsh to all proceedings in our courts through, for instance, automated judgment translation’.
She said English and Welsh law was increasingly diverging on devolved matters, and funding is being provided for the training of Welsh judges on new Welsh legislation.
Dame Sue Carr also reflected on her family links with Wales. Her grandfather, Harry Carr, ‘kept the wicket for Glamorgan’, and another relative edited The Western Mail.