welcome to hardtalk. i'm stephen sackur. women are still fighting for equality all over the world. even in long established democracies like the uk, plenty of evidence suggests that from the workplace to the law courts, there is an awful long way to go. my guest today, baroness helena kennedy, has been trying to loosen the grip of the patriarchy in the british legal system for five decades. is she winning the battles that really matter? baroness helena kennedy, welcome to hardtalk. nice to be here. it's great to have you. you have had a pretty extraordinary legal career spanning some five decades. yes, i know. you used to talk about a system that smelled of the patriarchy, a man's world. do you still see britain's legal system like that today? oh, yes. i mean, i think that we haven't yet managed to remove that power imbalance. it's still there. and, of course, a lot of work has been done and we've you know, reformed certain areas of law and we've seen women in many more positions of authority and power. but there's still an authority gap. there's still those problems of the ways in which women are treated and the issue of violence against women is still a serious problem even in a country like the united kingdom. we'll definitely get to that very quickly. butjust on the look of the system, in that chair not so long ago, we had the then head of the supreme court, baroness hale. we also look at statistics which show that the majority, a clear majority of young trainee lawyers in the uk today are female. so, at the very top and at the bottom, there does appear to be real change. stephen, i always remember that when i started to some extent in broadcasting and writing about these issues, which was back in the �*70s, i always rememberjudges and people saying to me, "it's only a question of evolution." you know, "many more women are coming into the law "and they'll work their way through the system "and then the system will be wonderfully equal and fair." and it's sort of denial of the fact that women's lives usually are rather different by virtue of the fact that they are child bearers, and although there's been a great sort of renegotiation of family life and women now are much more likely to have careers as well as families, there is still a great deal of hurdle that women have to surmount in order to get up through the system. but there's also all the other stuff which men just don't experience, which is the business of sexual harassment or discriminations because of assumptions that are made about women. and i love the fact that recently one of our great writers on political policy, mary ann sieghart, wrote a book called the authority gap, which actually talks about the ways in which even when you are a successful woman, you still face those things where perhaps your opinion has gone to second, or you make a suggestion about something and when it's repeated by a man, it's taken more seriously. so there are lots of areas where women still have a problem about progressing within our institutions generally and the law particularly. and is there a direct correlation between that continuing fact, as you see it, and one of the most shocking pieces of data to come from the uk legal system? that is that roughly 1.5% of reported rapes ever end up in a successful conviction. that number seems staggeringly low, horrifyingly low. do you connect it to what you've just described in the system? i think you have to really dig down to understand all of this. it's partly because law was man—made, and that's not saying there's some great conspiracy by men thoughtfully deciding to make the rules so that they didn't fit women's lives. it was just the nature of things. men were the people who had power. they made the rules, therefore they made the laws. and that's how it's been, and in our system, a common law system, that meant in the seniorjudiciary, it meant in parliament and so on. so the answer, you know, when i started writing about this in the �*70s and �*80s was, well, we need more women in those places of power. we need more women in parliament and particularly in the higher courts. and so let's do something about that. that was the �*70s and �*80s, and here we sit today with the extraordinary statistic that of 52,000 and more rapes recorded by police in england and wales in 2020, fewer than 850 resulted in charge or summons. what's going wrong? you can fiddle with the numbers. you can start getting more women in positions. but the problem is that if attitudes haven't changed, if the sort of way in which law has been structured has been around sort of male agency and the rules tend to be about, you know, the reasonable man test is now called the reasonable person test, but it's still based around what we assume is reasonable from the life experience ofa man. and it seems that many women who have reported or reported to friends, if not to the authorities, rape, feel that they cannot go through the procedures that would be required to go through a formal police investigation because it is, in theirview, dehumanising, it robs them of agency, and they choose not to do it. stephen, the real problem is that we've just had a great shock to the system recently in the sarah everard case, and then it was followed by another. just, if i interruptjust for a second, just to say the sarah everard case concerns the horrifying murder of a young woman in south london last year, and it turns out she was murdered by a serving police officer. a serving police officer who used his authority by, you know, being a policeman to stop her under covid, as though she were committing some offence by being out in the evening and then used his authority and power and arresting capacity in order to rape and then kill her. and then, you know, i mean, really defile her body. so, i mean, that brought up, for women, a conversation about how policing is not trusted. the levels of, for example, serving police officers who commit offences of a minor nature and where no consequence comes of them, that particular policeman exposing himself to women and nothing being done about it. it turns out that policeman was actually known, i say jokingly, bizarrely known to colleagues as "the rapist." absolutely. but we know that high levels of domestic violence are present in our male police force. i mean, there are women in the police as well who speak about the way in which misogyny operates within policing circles. so... as a woman and a top lawyer, are you telling me that you cannot feel you can place your trust in the police today? well, i think, like most institutions, it's is a variable feast, but there are sufficient numbers of people who still harbour strongly misogynistic attitudes towards women, think that things are quite acceptable. we've normalised a lot of behaviours and that's one of the things that women in this country are now really being very vocal about. it used to be that you didn't talk about it, the stuff that happens at the bus stop where, you know, somebody comes, tries to chat a young woman up. she expresses no interest and then offence is taken by the man, and then it starts turning ugly and the woman is afraid, and she's afraid because little girls in all of our societies are told from as soon as they reach puberty, "you must watch yourself. you've got to guard yourself. "you mustn't walk in streets alone. "be with your friends, don't go to the park "and don't speak to strangers." but if there is a toxic culture in which men simply refuse to accept their responsibility to change their behaviours and attitudes toward women, how do you fix that? well, you fix it in a number of different ways. and i, of course, am a lawyer, and i do believe that law has a role to play in all of this because there's something symbolic about saying, "these behaviours "are what are accepted in society and these are not." and that's what the law does — it sets the bar on certain kinds of behaviour. so you have to have law that is protective of women and which is basically pointing the finger at those who. .. well, where are the limits of what the law can actually achieve? and i ask that advisedly, because you now head up a scottish government working, sort of, reporting committee that's about to publish a report on the possibility of making misogyny a hate crime. now, this is particular to scotland, but i dare say people listening and watching around the world will be interested in this notion that you can criminalise misogyny. do you believe you can? let me be very clear. hate itself is not a crime. we don't have thought crime. we say that people should be allowed, inside ourforum internum, inside our minds, we can think what we want and we don't criminalise that. it's only in authoritarian states and totalitarian states that they try to punish our thoughts. so you can't criminalise someone for having misogynistic attitudes towards women. what you can do is criminalise the behaviours and the verbal assault and so on that comes from that belief system, because misogyny is a belief system. now, let's be very clear, not all men, you know, abuse women. they don't. in fact, you know, we all know good men. i'm sure you're one of them, stephen. but the problem about it is that it's hard to find a woman who hasn't had a bad experience with men behaving inappropriately. so let's go back to misogyny. can you make misogyny a hate crime? you can make the behaviours that flow from misogyny a hate crime because they emanate from misogyny. but you can only do that if it's possible to have some sort of clarity about where the lines are. i'm just very mindful that, perhaps a generation ago, men would have routinely wolf whistled at women, maybe made some smart aleck comments about women's appearance thinking that was their right, that was ok. are you suggesting that there is a way to design a law which would tell men that is not ok, and if they do it, they could face the force of the law? we already have laws here in the united kingdom, both in scotland and in england. and of course, i'm a lawyer who practises in the english courts and in international courts. butl... ..my experience of this is that threatening behaviour laws exist. threatening and abusive words or conduct, those...those, you know, offences are already on the statute books. the problem is that women don't know it's available for them, and police officers don't think about it when a woman says, "i was at the bus stop and a man started abusing me "and talking about my body in an unacceptable way." i mean, i can't repeat on camera the things that we heard in taking evidence before my working group in scotland. horrible, horrible stuff that women are expected to listen to, which are of a sexual nature, usually, and which are humiliating and degrading, and which leave women feeling, particularly those who are young, feeling a...a kind of assault upon their being. and so it's an issue of human rights, really. and so... what you've just said is interesting, cos the westminster government, led by borisjohnson, as they've considered the notion of misogyny becoming a defined crime, they've said, "no, that's absolutely the wrong way to go. "what we have to do is "to train and educate the police and others to ensure "that the current laws are properly executed "when it comes to protecting women and women's security. "we don't need new laws. "we just need to enforce the ones we've got properly." it doesn't work. and it's so interesting that the johnson government is saying that about women. they've just introduced, they're just in the process of introducing a new crime concerning the theft of dogs. and the theft of dogs is going to be introduced on the basis that... we have theft legislation. you can prosecute somebody who steals a dog as much as stealing your watch. however, they feel that this is very important because during lockdown, lots of people became very attached to dogs and...and they pay a lot of money for dogs, so they're very valuable now. and so they're saying, there should be a special crime created about the theft of dogs. if you want to hone in on something, like what's happening to women, then you can, even if you've got some laws around that you can dig around and find, then i think that you have an obligation as a government to do something about it. but there's another potential problem with misogyny as a crime, and it was outlined by the former equalities minister, a conservative female politician, victoria atkins. she said we should be very careful about creating laws that inadvertently conflict with the basic principle of equality. she said, if we're to have a hate crime in relation to gender, we need to think very carefully about whether that would apply to the entire population orjust to the half of it that is female, cos ultimately, she says, remember, women are not a minority and shouldn't be treated as such. that... but she's really, really falling down that great well, that even women who are trained in the law can fall down, which is, you know, we argued for equality. all right, so we want equality between men and women. you don't achieve it byjust saying, "let's have equality." you actually have to be very active in trying to ameliorate the terrible things that have happened in the past, which have prevented there being equality. so announcing, "let's have equality, "and let's tomorrow say that all the laws that apply to men "should apply to women too, like threatening behaviour," doesn't do it because women's experience is different, of life is different. men do not, late at night, say to theirfriend, as they're coming out of the pub, they don't say, "charlie, text me when you get home "so that i can know that you're safe." women say it to each other all the time. women's experience is different. a quick thought on your own personal experience, a rather bizarre one you had some 30 years ago when you hosted a tv show. the ratherfamous, or infamous, actor 0liver reed was on the show. he... yes! ..appeared to be drunk, and at some point during that live broadcast, he physically... assaulted a woman. ..assaulted a woman who was a guest on your show. kate m illett. yes, i mean, she was a very, very well—known feminist, and that was a serious example of...of misogynistic conduct where he was...he was... ..he was really degrading a woman in front of a viewing public. right, and ultimately, he left the show. it was clear the other guests would not tolerate his actions. well, i invited the other guests, i said to them, "do you think this is acceptable behaviour?" and they all said "no." but my point... and i said... ..helena kennedy, is this. do you believe that 0liver reed should have been prosecuted? and if there was a specific crime about misogyny, would he have offended and therefore been liable to prosecution under that new criminal offence? i suppose we would have arguments about whether a television studio is a public place, but since you're putting this out to the general public, i think he should have been prosecuted, yeah. let me ask you about a different aspect of the way culture is changing, and that is, i suppose you could encapsulate it in the metoo movement. many women, partly, i think, because of things you've said about their scepticism about the way policing works, the judicial system works, some women are taking to social media and are naming men, sometimes anonymously, not giving away their own identities, but naming men and accusing them of sometimes egregious sexual abuse. do you believe that is legitimate? you're a lawyer. you believe in process, court of law and... due process, absolutely. ..evidence. yeah. so do you believe that that approach is legitimate or not? i think that's civil disobedience, and let me tell you why. it's a bit like the suffragettes throwing bricks through windows. you'll get that kind of behaviour when the law, when the legal system and the system that's operating in our democracy is not delivering to half the population. and so women are basically throwing a brick through the system's windows, saying, "you tell us that when people do bad things to us, "we should take it to law. and when we do take it to law, "it is not prosecuted, it... we're not listened to. "we are treated also as second class citizens "and there's disbelief... everywhere we go." but there is still, as you would, as a lawyer, acknowledge the basic principle of innocent until proven guilty. and even some sort of traditionalfeminists like germaine greer think that metoo has now gone too far. is there a part of you that sees that argument? totally. i mean, i'vejust written a book on this, misjustice, which is... ..which is, in which i express my real concern that this is not about due process, that people will suffer the consequences of being named by anonymous persons and their... ..and their lives being deeply affected by that. however, you'll get more of that when the system is failing so many people. so that's why the system has to address the fact that women do not feel that they're getting justice within our systems. let me ask you a question which takes us far from the courtrooms in the uk to an international perspective that you've long had. how on earth do you prioritise the time, the effort, the energy you give to all of these causes and legal issues in the uk, when at the same time you're doing an awful lot of work for human rights overseas, in particular, right now, you've spent an awful lot of time trying to help female judges in afghanistan, who for many months, even before the taliban finally took over, faced life—threatening insecurity inside afghanistan and still do today. how do you prioritise? how do you decide what to give your time to? well, look, i am both a lawyer here in the united kingdom, and i run an institute of human rights for the international bar association, so i'm very involved with the international, too. when in august, i started receiving phone calls from women judges in afghanistan and women prosecutors who are terrified out of their lives because they were on the taliban's kill lists, i have an obligation. these are my sisters in law. these are women who are doing the same sort of thing that i'm seeking to do. they were really running women's courts, often, where they were trying to get justice for women, against violence against women. there had been an introduction of the international convention, the un convention on ending violence against women. it had been brought into afghanistan law and women were involved in those courts and prosecuting those offences, and then the men were released from prison and were coming after them. so, you know, for as far as i was concerned, the international community, particularly the legal community, had a duty to act. i understand. i mean, it's a very powerful case you make, and the humanitarian need is very obvious. but are you saying...? well, we got a lot of them out... but are you saying that britain and other countries, cos this is also about the law, it's about attitude and policy making toward migration, are you saying that all due process has to be suspended at times because the humanitarian impulse is so overwhelming? i think that you have to continue to see justice in its bigger context, because when we're talking about what was happening to those judges, that was about serious injustice, that was about the removal of law from the whole...from the whole business. and we had been encouraging those courts in afghanistan and the legal profession in afghanistan to really perform, you know, in a way that we felt would be for the betterment of society. we encouraged all of that. we have a duty when, suddenly, those people who were doing it are turned on, and it was particularly women who were at risk. all the intelligence agencies put them at the top of the risk list. so i mean, that was why i then ended up raising money to charter flights to get them out of that situation, and i'm still trying to do it, but you know, you chew and walk at the same time, stephen. you...you try and do those practical things, protecting some of the people in your own professional world who are in absolute danger, mortal danger. but you also carry on looking at the law in your own country and say, "hey, this is not... "this is all part of a continuum." and if we're going to talk about a world that is going to be just for women and men, and men benefit from this, too, and good men have to come onside and help us as women to get rid of misogyny. in a funny sort of way, you lead me to my last question, and that is about whether right now, you, as a very senior lawyer in the united kingdom, think that the uk is setting the world a great example. and i'm thinking of one particular example, that is the prime minister, borisjohnson, under enormous political pressure as we speak because it appears to many people, though he denies it, that he broke lockdown rules during the covid crisis, particularly its early phase in may 2020. the rules were very strict. it turns out he and his wife attended a social gathering inside the garden of number ten downing street. he's said he's sorry, but he's said he thought it was a work meeting. just as a labour peer, a politician of sorts, do you regard this as something which makes borisjohnson�*s position untenable? well, i want to speak about it as a lawyer. you've got to remember that this was at the height of the pandemic in 2020. it wasn't in the last year, but it was the year before, when we first had, it was the first few months of the pandemic and we were all involved in a lockdown. i had a rather big birthday at that time and was not able to have any celebrations, and my children came and stood at the gate of our garden and waved and put presents down at the foot of the path because we were not allowed to associate at that time, you know...you know, in multiples. and so that was...that�*s the sort of thing... people were dying. people were not being able to see their families in hospitals. so, it was a very serious time. this wasn'tjust as it is now. it was a very serious time. and to be having parties, you know, is basically saying, "the little people... "the law, you know, is for the little people. "we don't have to apply ourselves to that." and that's...that is where you get serious. it's a corruption of the system when people at the top don't think the law is about them. what was magna carta about? it was about, "nobody is above the law." and so i feel that boris johnson really let down the nation. and i would say that, i promise you, i didn't give... when labour was in government, i didn't give them an easy time on issues to do with law, because the law really matters to me. and... but this, i do think, it's where the rule makers start breaking the rules, they have to be held accountable. sadly, we are accountable for the time and we've run out of it. i'm sorry about that! we could have talked about so much! baroness helena kennedy, we have to end. thank you so much forjoining us. you're welcome. thank you. hello there. it's been an unsettled start to 2022, hasn't it? but wednesday changed all that for many across england and wales. after a frosty and foggy start, we had pictures like this — a beautiful scene in wrexham, hardly a cloud in the sky. it was chilly with it, but further north, we had more cloud. however, it was scotland and northern ireland that had the milder weather, with temperatures topping out at 12 or 13 degrees across eastern scotland and northeast england. now, this was the what situation on wednesday, and it's a fairly similar story to close out the working week. high pressure�*s still with us, a south—westerly feeding cloud and a little bit of patchy drizzle across the far north and west. but under those clearer skies and with very light winds, we will see frost and fog forming once again. so, temperatures potentially down as low as —3 in a few rural parts, the exception, the far north of scotland. yes, it will be frosty, but also, it will be foggy, particularly for parts of england and wales. some of the fog dense in places, and it may well take most of the morning before it slowly lifts into low cloud and hopefully disperses. so, a pretty miserable start, but hopefully improving later on. the cloud, that south—westerly breeze again thick enough for a spot or two of drizzle, but we could see double figures across the far north of scotland, despite the winds gusting in excess of 40—50 miles per hour across the northern isles. so, a blustery afternoon here, light winds, not shifting that fog some time soon. so, temperatures will struggle just a touch — 6—8 degrees across england and wales. as we move out of thursday into friday, the high pressure not moving very far very fast, which basically means we will continue to see a good deal of quiet weather. this weather front again increasing the risk of tonight, patchy rain, nothing particularly significant. fog could be more extensive on friday, and as a result, it could be slow to clear. if that happens, one or two places might not see temperatures climbing out of freezing, but if we get the sunshine coming through again, we're looking at 5—7 to the south, maximum of 10 or 11 degrees across the far north. now, as we move towards the weekend, that quieter theme will stay with us. a good deal of dry weather. the question is just how much sunshine we will see. welcome to newsday, reporting live from singapore. i'm karishma vaswani. the headlines: britain's prime minister faces more calls to resign from his own party after admitting he attended a downing street drinks gathering at the height of covid lockdown in may 2020. i regret the way the event i have described was handled. i bitterly regret it and wish that we could have done things differently, and i have and will continue to apologise for what we did. prince andrew fails to get a civil case dismissed in the us which accuses him of sexually assaulting a teenage girl. he has consistently denied the allegations against him. also in the programme: the tennis star novak djokovic admits making mistakes