Clause 49
Coroners and Justice Bill
6:00 pm
Edward Garnier (Shadow Minister, Justice; Harborough, Conservative)
We now move into a completely different realm, dealing with an adjustment to the criminal law concerned with images of children, and whether it should be an offence to possess certain prohibited images. The amendments, standing in my name and those of my hon. Friends the Members for North-West Norfolk and for Rugby and Kenilworth, are broadly in two and a half parts.
There is a simple point regarding amendment 72, which concerns clause 49(2)(c). I want to know what the use of “disgusting” in the clause adds to the offence. “Offensive behaviour” is a term that criminal courts, and, I think, most members of the public who come into contact with pornography or antisocial sexual behaviour, are aware of, while “disgusting” seems to be simply an emotive term that does not—unless I can be persuaded otherwise—help the shape of the clause very much. It is a great word to spit out and it adds emphasis to one’s sense of abhorrence at the thing that one is looking at, but I wonder why the Government think that it is appropriate to use that word in addition to “grossly offensive”. It leads one to wonder, if the prohibited image is grossly offensive and disgusting, or otherwise of an obscene character, where that paragraph leads one to. I think that the Director of Public Prosecutions, Mr. Starmer, told us in the evidence sessions that “disgusting” was not an unusual word to be used in criminal statutes, dealing with this particular area of the criminal law, and while I am happy to be corrected, I think that it is unnecessary and over-egging the pudding. That is the half part of my two and a half parts that deal with prohibited images.
The first main part leads us to a discussion on whether the evil or wrong that we seek to prohibit is best captured by attacking possession of prohibited images of children or, as we suggest in our amendment, their publication. For those purposes, publication means the making known of an image to a third party. It is not the technical process of publishing a newspaper or book. Making known to a third party is drawn from defamation law.
My suggestion—I am entirely open to others—is that we are dealing with unreal people, not with human beings or children. If we were, the position would be different, because someone taking an obscene photograph or creating an obscene drawing of a real child needs to have the child in front of them doing the obscene act, or depicted doing it. Here, we are talking about images of children that do not require the presence of a child to create the image. A silly example is a disgusting old man—