Clause 11
Coroners and Justice Bill
10:30 am
Edward Garnier (Shadow Minister, Justice; Harborough, Conservative)
No, clause 11 is designed to keep juries out. It is designed to keep the public out and to make the inquest process a secret one. I believe in open justice, and in the public having access to the issues in controversy in an inquest, as I do in relation to criminal trials. If there is no open justice, one cannot have confidence in the judicial and courts system. Although individual Ministers and Secretaries of State may be well motivated, once this sort of clause becomes available to be used by the authorities, they will use it. One has only to look at the hoo-hah at the weekend over the coming into force of certain parts of the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008 to see what happens.
Under section 76 of the Counter-Terrorism Act, entitled “Offences relating to information about members of armed forces etc”, it is now an offence, punishable by 10 years’ imprisonment, to elicit or attempt to elicit
“information about an individual who is or has been...a constable, which is of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism, or”
if he
“publishes or communicates any such information.”
That has been discussed over the weekend as giving the police the power to confiscate, or to delete, photographs taken of them.
An example was given in The Guardian correspondence column this morning, by a magistrate, of an offence that had taken place on the street that was not only photographed by CCTV but had been photographed on the mobile telephone of a passer-by. The police confiscated that mobile telephone and deleted the photographic evidence on the basis, presumably, that section 76 of the Counter-Terrorism Act applied and allowed them to do so. It was a silly and unnecessary thing for them to have done, but it is it the sort of thing that happens when authorities are given powers that may not be intended to be used in that particular way but which inevitably do get used in that way.