Clause 11
Coroners and Justice Bill
11:30 am
James Gray (North Wiltshire, Conservative)
That is a misreading of the Bill. The hon. Gentleman is right in saying that clause 11(1)(b) states that the Secretary of State may make such a certificate only if
“no other measures would be adequate to prevent the matter being made public.”
In other words, the clause starts with the presumption that the matters must not be made public and, if the ways in which the matter cannot be made public are not adequate, then the Secretary of State has an additional power to keep them secret. It is not a question of such matters mostly being available to the public; the clause lays down that the Secretary of State either already has powers to keep them secret, or that these measures will give him extra powers to keep them secret. My argument is that they should not be kept secret—they should be available to the public. That is one of the most fundamental principles in coronial inquests at the moment.
I say that for three reasons. The first reason involves the interests of the public. It seems perfectly obvious that the public need to know why people die—in particular, at the hand of the state. Secondly, there may well be reasons why something went wrong at the hands of the state and ways in which that could be corrected. A coroner may come up with conclusions—as David Masters and the Oxfordshire coroner have done in military inquests—to show that things went wrong. If such things were heard in secret, there would be no way of knowing whether the state had corrected them. Thirdly, the family of the bereaved need closure, and they get closure by having an entirely public inquest. If that inquest is in private, and the family, or representatives of the family do not know why the person in question was killed, can they ever get closure? For those three good reasons, it seems that most matters should be in public. There may be some extreme cases of national security where some degree of secrecy should be allowed, and I shall come back to that.
I shall now focus my remarks on military inquests. The arguments can also be applied to inquests into people who have been killed in prisons or wrongly killed in other areas, with regard to the public security or public safety—police shootings and so on come under the same category. My own particular interest and expertise, such that it is, concerns military inquests. Virtually every military inquest would fall under the description of the clause. Almost any death in a theatre of war or on a battlefield could be deemed to have national security implications or to place the interests of the Government or our relationship with an overseas country at the heart of consideration. I cannot think of any military inquest that would not fall under the clause—if the Government disagree with that, perhaps they can raise it in a moment.
Regarding the two young soldiers—one was shot by the Taliban, I think, while the other was blown up by a roadside bomb—aspects of their deaths could theoretically harm the national interest. Should that patrol have been at that place at that particular time? Who were the enemy? Who shot them? Did we have adequate protection for our vehicles to prevent them from being blown up? With such low-level deaths—I do not mean that in a bad way; I mean the deaths of ordinary soldiers on a battlefield—there are all sorts of ways to argue that an inquest would be against the public interest.
Boring down further, I give the example—