Justice (Electronic Monitoring)

Part of the debate – in the Scottish Parliament at on 27 June 2019.

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Photo of Ruth Davidson Ruth Davidson Conservative

What I asked the First Minister was whether the measures sound like justice to her. Here are the people to whom they do not sound like justice.

Scottish Women’s Aid has said:

“To be a credible deterrent, breach of the electronic monitoring condition must be an automatic criminal offence.”

Victim Support Scotland has said that breaches of a tag must be punished

“to maintain the trust of victims and the community” because, as Victim Support also said,

“communities have no faith in community sentencing ... because ... it takes too long for someone to be found to be in breach of their order.”—[

Official Report, Justice Committee

, 8 May 2018; c 39.]

The SNP could have fixed that by making the breach of a tag a specific offence punishable by a sentence. Was it just because it was a Tory suggestion that the First Minister refused to do that?