The Family Court's top judge says some battered women are missing out on court orders to protect them from their partners because they can't find a lawyer willing to represent them on the current legal aid fees.
Chief Judge Peter Boshier said the number of women applying for
protection orders without a lawyer had increased in recent years to about 30 per cent.
He believed this was a major reason why the proportion of applications for protection orders that were being placed "on notice" have risen since the late 1990s.
A Waikato University report published Monday blamed the trend on judges "raising the threshold" of violence required to grant a protection order without notice - a claim the judge denied. "We are a court, we are making judicial decisions. We can't just grant everything because we happen to think domestic violence is evil," he said.
"As long as there is evidence that indicates that there is going to be harm because of domestic violence, we will grant an order.
"But some of it [the trend] will be to do with the fact that there are more self-litigants and they are not producing to us the stuff we need to be sure of the minimum threshold to grant a protection order."
He said no figures were kept on domestic violence victims filing without a lawyer, but "it would not surprise me if it was 30 per cent" of them.
"Anecdotally, judges will tell you that because some lawyers regard legal aid fees as inappropriately low, they are not encouraged to do domestic violence legal aid work."
He endorsed recommendations in the Waikato report that legal aid fees for domestic violence work should be raised and the eligibility criteria revised so that all bona fide applications for protection orders should be free to the applicants.
The Legal Services Agency confirmed that legal aid fees for domestic violence work had not been changed since 1999, when they were reduced. The agency is due to present proposed new fees on September 30.
The number of grants of legal aid for cases which included applications for protection orders has fallen by about 200 since 2004.
