Minister’s fury as Scottish judges tell PM: ‘You broke law’ (But English High Court says he didn’t)

Champion of ‘auld alliance’ with France

Lord Brodie, 69, promotes strong relations between Scotland and France as head of the Franco-Scottish Society.

He is the son of a senior Church of Scotland minister who took a law degree at Edinburgh University and became an advocate.

His rise to Scotland’s senior court took him through various advisory roles in Whitehall.

He is married with three children, and lists interests including fencing and walking, and protecting the civic grandeur of the Scottish capital, where he lives.

The Franco-Scottish Society says it exists to ‘foster contacts between the French and the Scots and to develop their traditional friendship enshrined – since at least 1295 – in the Auld Alliance’.

Historically the Auld Alliance was aimed against England. The last Scottish monarch to pursue it, before her execution by Elizabeth I, was Mary Queen of Scots, whose recently established statue in Linlithgow near Edinburgh was financed with the help of the Franco-Scottish Society.

The Society, founded in 1895, describes its mission as to ‘increase and disseminate in Scotland knowledge of France and the French way of life, with particular reference to its economic, social, political, historical and cultural institutions and developments’.

Honorary presidents of the society, founded in 1985, include the French ambassador to Britain, Catherine Colonna, and Sir David Edward, a Scottish judge who also served as a judge of the Luxembourg-based EU Court of Justice.

Jazz lover who gave a warning on Brexit

As Lord President of the Court of Session, Lord Carloway, 65, is Scotland’s most senior judge.

He took up the role four years ago, having previously been appointed Lord Justice Clerk – the second most senior position in the Scottish judiciary – on the recommendation of then First Minister Alex Salmond.

As Colin Sutherland, he became a judge in 2000 and has presided over many high-profile cases – and in 2005 handed gas utility firm Transco a record £15million fine over an explosion which killed four members of a family in 1999.

Eight years ago he published a major report on the integration of Scottish law with European human rights and EU law.

In a speech in March 2017, he said Brexit was ‘likely to be a very onerous task’.

A graduate of Edinburgh University, he is married to a GP and has two sons. He is lead singer and bassist in the jazz band of the Faculty of Advocates called the Reclaimers.

Ruled in favour of Europe

Lord Drummond Young, 69, left, has been a judge of the Supreme Courts of Scotland since 2001.

Married with a daughter, he studied law at Cambridge, Harvard and Edinburgh and, after serving as a legal adviser to several Whitehall departments, became a QC in England in 1998.

Last September he sat alongside Lord Carloway to give a ruling in favour of Scottish politicians who wanted to give the judges of the EU Court of Justice a say over whether Article 50, Britain’s formal declaration of Brexit, could be revoked.

On Tuesday, he was one of three judges to cut the sentence of Aaron Campbell, who killed six-year-old schoolgirl Alesha MacPhail on the Isle of Bute last year. The ruling, due to the age of Campbell at the time, sparked fury, with the Scottish Conservative Party calling it ‘disgraceful’.

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