Britain’s only black High Court judge last night condemned the “woefully slow” rate of progress over opening up the judiciary to non-white candidates.

Mrs Justice Dobbs also raised the idea of quotas to increase the numbers of women and non-white judges. She challenged the Judicial Appointments Commission - which believes that quotas would undermine the principle that judges are appointed on merit - by arguing that merit would not be an issue if there were enough good candidates from the ethnic minorities.

In a lecture at Queen Mary, University of London, Mrs Justice Dobbs said that since her own appointment in 2004 there had been about 30 new High Court judges appointed of which two were women and none black.

She said that although overall figures showed a rise in women and ethnic-minority judicial appointments, these were mostly at low or part-time levels. “These figures mask the fact that there is little progress in terms of diversity in the higher tiers of the judiciary from at least circuit-judge level and above; and arguably from recorder level and above,” she said.

She called for a range of proactive measures to promote diversity to be taken by ministers, by the profession and by the commission. These could include more mentoring and shadowing schemes, “aggressive” encouragement by the Bar to involve women and ethnic-minority lawyers and rigorous monitoring of its equality code, she said.

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