Lord Young

Lord Young (Lawyer, judge)
Alma mater	University of Aberdeen, University of Glasgow
Judge who sisted (cancelled) Scottish judicial review of Palestine Action ban

Not to be confused with Andrew Young the US diplomat

Lord Young was appointed a Scottish judge of the Supreme Courts in May 2022.

Andrew Young graduated from the University of Aberdeen in 1988 and from the University of Glasgow in 1989. After a traineeship with Dundas & Wilson CS, he was called to the Scottish Bar in 1992. He served as standing junior counsel to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, HM Customs & Excise and HM Revenue & Customs.

He was appointed Queens Counsel in 2007. He has been a part time chairman of the Police Appeals Tribunal since 2013 and a part time chairman of the Competition Appeals Tribunal since 2021. He is the co-author of a textbook on Commission & Diligence, and has also been a contributor to two editions of Gloag & Henderson “The Law of Scotland”.

Lord Young permits review of PA ban

On 27 January 2026, a separate Scottish Judicial Review of the ban on Palestine Action was allowed to go ahead by Lord Young at Scotland's highest civil court. Former diplomat Craig Murray brought a petition for a review of the decision to the Court of Session earlier in January.

Lord Young granted permission for the case to proceed with a procedural hearing on 23 February and a two-day substantive hearing on 17 and 18 March 2026.

File:Lord Young's permission.png

Challenge by Advocate-General

On 27 May 2026, Craig Murray wrote:

Our hearing in the Scottish Court of Session tomorrow will hear our motion that the proscription in Scotland should be suspended pending the Scottish judicial review, because in the meantime hundreds of people are having their civil liberties restricted and facing possible arrest, and scores are facing charges for terrorist offences merely for exercising their right of free speech.

The UK government is opposing with a counter motion to sist (postpone) the entire Scottish judicial review until all English proceedings are concluded, including a probable eventual Supreme Court decision. Their key argument is that it is constitutionally undesirable for English and Scottish courts to reach opposing decisions in a matter of “national security”.

That Scottish courts should respect English decisions they present not as colonialism, but as “Comity”.

They state that the constitutional argument is so important that the Advocate-General herself, Catherine Smith KC, will represent the UK government in person. Indeed this hearing was delayed by two weeks to fit her diary.

Their argument is of course disingenuous. They are not seeking to postpone the Scottish hearing, they are seeking to stop it altogether. If it is constitutionally unacceptable to reach a different decision from the English court, then what would be the point of a Scottish judicial review at any stage?

Furthermore they are entirely illogical because the status quo is that the government has lost to Palestine Action in England at the High Court. It is the government which is appealing there. So if they really believed in “comity” they would drop the government case in Scotland to achieve the same position as England!

Most of the argument we have submitted to court consists of analysis of the effects of the proscription and the impact of suspending it.

The government by contrast have not addressed the proscription at all. They are depending entirely on the constitutional argument that the court should not be hearing the case. But these exact arguments were already dismissed by the court at the permission stage. They do not become any more compelling just because a UK government minister is stating them.

Why is the government so confident it will win on the constitutional point and does not need to address the proscription?

I fear the appearance of the minister is evidence of an Establishment stitch-up. My hackles rise particularly at the remarkable fact that, while the permission hearing was livestreamed and in Court No 1, this much more important hearing is not being livestreamed and is relegated to Court No 6, with a much smaller public gallery. If the case is, as the government itself states, of such constitutional importance that the minister must appear in person, why is it being hidden from the public gaze?

Unfortunately I can’t think of any answers to that question which are not deeply troubling.

Lord Young decides to sist

The following day, Craig Murray wrote:

I went through yesterday’s preliminary hearing in the Scottish judicial review of the proscription of Palestine Action with a sense of mounting horror. We had the same judge as at the permission hearing, Lord Young. We had exactly the same arguments and the same case law being deployed again by the UK government as at the permission hearing. But there the sense of déjà vu ended. The judge, Lord Young, appeared to be rowing backwards from his decision to grant the judicial review, as fast as he possibly could.

I may be wrong – we will have his decision in three hours’ time. I hope I am wrong. I quite often am wrong.

But every indication was that I am not wrong. English proceedings at an advanced stage seemed in his mind to have shifted, from an irrelevance in a different jurisdiction, to a fundamental reason not to proceed. The costs of holding a physical review, in terms of the actual pounds and pennies of having courts, had been dismissed contemptuously by Lord Young when advanced by the government as a reason not to hold a judicial review at the permission hearing.

Lord Young now himself raised the cost of a Scottish judicial review as a potential reason for not having one. Three times.

He also made plain from the outset that he was considering the Starmer regime motion for sisting (postponing in effect forever) the Scottish judicial review as a matter of case management, not as a matter of principle of whether the court had jurisdiction. For that reason, if he decided to sist he would not be contradicting his previous decision that the review could go ahead.

The solution was not openly to deny Scotland’s rights, but administrative delay. Forever.

The main obvious thing that had changed was not the government arguments, but the person making them. This hearing had itself been postponed almost three weeks to fit the diary of the Advocate-General, Catherine Smith KC, who was representing the Starmer regime in person because – as the Government submission directly stated – of the great constitutional importance of the case.

Catherine Smith KC is political royalty. Daughter of former Labour leader the late John Smith and of Baroness Smith, sister of the BBC’s Washington correspondent Sarah Smith, and sister-in-law of the son of former Secretary General of NATO, Lord Robertson. I could go on.

She is also rubbish in court. She presented the government’s arguments much worse that they had originally been presented, with a really revolting mix of personal arrogance and profound lack of articulacy. She sometimes appeared unable to put a coherent sentence together, and on the rare occasions when she did so, we were generally left wondering in what way it linked to the last one. Lord Young frequently rescued her by expressing the idea she had been groping her way towards with all the alacrity of a blindfolded person in handcuffs.

At one point Lord Young actually said to the Advocate-General: “You haven’t explained that very well”.

Nevertheless, he took it that there was great force behind her arguments, now that it had been made very plain by the despatch of this august personage that London took this very seriously indeed. He gave every indication of a willingness to be herded. It merely made his life so difficult that they had despatched such an incompetent shepherd.

Very early in proceedings Lord Young had been at great pains to point out that his agreement that we had the right to a Scottish judicial review had always been subject to possible cancellation for reasons of “case management”. In principle there was a right to a Scottish judicial review. But there were practicalities of case management to consider, and one of those practicalities was the existence in England of the Ammori case which was now at a much more advanced stage, with the English Court of Appeal going to announce its decision on 15 June. It may then proceed to the UK Supreme Court which covers Scotland anyway.

In the course of the day, Joanna Cherry pointed out that our Scottish judicial review had been due to happen back in March – and the reason it had been delayed was the UK government introducing “secret intelligence” evidence which had been heard in closed sessions. To “sist” or postpone the case until the end of UK proceedings meant to drop it forever. To do this on procedural grounds because of delays introduced by the government being reviewed would be unfair on the petitioner.

In the Cherry and Miller cases the UK Supreme Court had been faced with different decisions of the English and Scottish courts on the same issue. The English court could be wrong. Mr Murray as a resident of Scotland was entitled to the protection of the courts of his place of domicile. Scotland and England were separate jurisdictions with separate legal systems and separate legal traditions.

Catherine Smith for the Starmer regime took a hardline unionist position. It was undesirable for Palestine Action to be legal in Scotland and not in England, and she did not believe that such a position could be “competent” as terrorism was a reserved matter under the Scotland Act. She was very scathing about the evidence that, two months before the proscription, the Scottish CONTEST board (the official counter-terrorism strategy board of the Scottish government, which includes Police Scotland and the security services) had minuted that Palestine Action in Scotland “did not come close” to meeting the definition of a terrorist organisation. The Scottish board is a “local board”, she said, which did not have access to all the intelligence available to the main counter terrorism bodies in London.

London sent a regime minister to overawe the court in Edinburgh and remind us of our position in the world. We have been telt.

The Starmer regime’s arguments were founded on “judicial comity”, which amounted to simply an argument that the judiciaries of the different jurisdictions of the United Kingdom should not disagree with each other, as expressed by the High Court of England in the “liberty case”. This was almost word for word the argument they had made, and was the case they had advanced, at the permission hearing. Even Lord Young rather bridled at this.

“Are you saying I got this wrong?” he asked.

“Yes”, Smith replied.

There was so much more to report, but my current state of health doesn’t allow me to spend long days in court followed by long evenings writing up, and I suppose the decision today will overtake much of it. I paste below the original decision by Lord Young to grant the appeal – you will notice that is quite a ringing declaration that citizens in Scotland are entitled to the protection of the Scottish courts – is indeed then undercut by an escape route that issues of “case management” may make proceeding with the review undesirable and are a different question.

I hope I am wrong, but I suspect that Lord Young will today rule that I was entitled to a judicial review but “case management” means it should be shelved in favour of the English case.

On 28 May 2026, at Edinburgh's Court of Session, Lord Young decided to put the Scottish legal challenge to the UK government's ban on Palestine Action on hold.