Access to Justice for Women in the Court of Appeal (Criminal Division)

We are pleased to announce that our Women’s Justice Advocate is undertaking some groundbreaking research into access to justice for women in the Court of Appeal (Criminal Division).

The purpose of the research is to explore the barriers faced by women seeking to appeal convictions and sentences from the Crown Court to the Court of Appeal (Criminal Division). The research is funded by the Griffins Fellowship, which encourages new thinking about women and girls in the criminal justice system, and is hosted by the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge University.

Given the well documented challenges faced by women sentenced to custody, and the fall in the number of criminal appeals across the system, this research project seeks to find out whether or not the criminal appeal system is accessible to women and to identify what the particular barriers to appealing convictions and sentences for women may be.

One of the ways we hope to find out, is by asking lawyers and legal professionals to fill out a questionnaire to better understand how lawyers work within the criminal appeals system and their experiences of representing women in it. All answers to this survey will be anonymous in the final paper.

If you are a legal professional and would like to support us in this project, please be sure to fill out the survey below. Alternatively, you can access it through this link.

The questionnaire will remain open until August 31st 2019.