JCC Report Exposes Ongoing Judicial Bullying Claims

New Zealand’s Judicial Conduct Commissioner, the long-suffering and certainly the long-serving Alan Ritchie, has released his annual report, and surprise: the complaints box is still overflowing. Bullying, incompetence, and glacial case progress continue to stalk the courts like unwanted familiars.

Bullying, delays and what might politely be called “robust bench manner” continue to stalk the system, according to the report.

On paper, things look better. The Commissioner reports 253 complaints involving 327 judges – a neat improvement on last year’s 413 but – as usual – room for improvement.

The judiciary may be tempted to view this as vindication but hidden in the polite tables are seven complaints serious enough to be fired upstairs to heads of bench, six in the District Court and one in the Māori Land Court, plus the separate referral of District Court Judge Ema Aitken to a full Judicial Conduct Panel.

The starring role in this drama goes, inevitably, to bullying and tone. More than half the complaints involve allegations that judges crossed the line from “firm” to “what on earth was that?”

The report prefers the phrase “speaking in an inappropriate way”, a bureaucratic euphemism for what many lawyers describe rather more bluntly. One senior advocate talks about “the routine public shredding of counsel as if it were part of the day’s list”.

A junior says the real skill now is “learning how to be humiliated efficiently so you can still get through your submissions before lunch”.

The official explanation explains that courtrooms are “highly stressful environments”, tempers flare. The Commissioner leans heavily on audio recordings to determine whether judges have in fact misbehaved.

Time and again the conclusion is that the judge was simply being “firm” and operating within the judicial conduct guidelines. In other words if the cruelty sounds calm enough on replay, it may not count as bullyinig within the JCC guidelines.

The guidelines themselves are perfectly sensible, namely to decide according to law, not popularity, maintain order, be moderate. But they nevertheless leave ample room for what one barrister calls “weaponised civility”.

The Informal Workaround

Around this, a kind of shadow architecture is emerging. Heads of bench and the New Zealand Law Society have stitched together an informal process for dealing with complaints about conduct, a sort of whisper‑friendly alternative to the full machinery of a formal complaint.

Nothing says “we have this under control” quite like inventing an off‑the‑books workaround to your existing oversight regime.

Meanwhile the bullying issue has been pressing enough for lawyers at the pointy end of the problem to establish the New Zealand Lawyers Protection Association (NZLPA) which has appeared, sounding, from its name, like a mutual society for chronically over‑schooled professionals, and in reality functioning as a pressure group for those who have had enough of being barked at by belligerent judges.

Interestingly, the NZLPA noted in its setup announcement in March 2025 that in 2021 there had been 3,200 complaints against Judges in the 16 years since 2005, but only two had formal discipline and even these did not have a final panel convened to deal with the matters. From 2005 to 2021 not a single judge has ever been formally disciplined. (Newsroom 27/4/21)

Alan Ritchie in his report concedes that this new organisation may help illuminate the “nature and extent” of the problem, which is a polite way of suggesting the official numbers might be only the tip of the iceberg.

Over in the political gallery, the mood has sharpened. Attorney‑General Judith Collins KC has already likened some courtrooms to boarding schools and announced zero tolerance for bullies, which, coming from someone not exactly known for excessive sensitivity, should give the more theatrical members of the bench pause.

Within the profession, references to “more‑than‑occasional cruelty” from judges have become a kind of shorthand where everyone knows what it means, nobody is especially surprised by it, and too many still treat it as an occupational hazard rather than a systemic failure.

A judiciary that can point to falling complaint numbers while the people on the receiving end talk in terms of survival strategies. Lawyers now routinely advise juniors to keep their own notes of incidents, press for audio, and think carefully about whether to go informal, go formal or go public.

The annual report, read alone, sounds measured, sober, almost comfortingly dull. Read against the lived experience of those who have to stand up in front of the same judges tomorrow morning, it starts to look less like reassurance and more like a careful record of how far the system is prepared to go to acknowledge a problem without quite admitting it.