I, too, rise to speak to amendment 95, to which my name is attached, along with that of the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn).
As the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes)and others have said, the history of serious cases of miscarriages of justice should bear very heavily indeed on all Members. I include in that the cases that were fought, promoted and championed against very difficult headwinds here in Parliament by Members of all parties. I recall Conservative Members like the late John Biggs-Davison and others championing those cases alongside Labour and Liberal MPs—but little thanks did they get for it from sections of the media and others.
My own predecessors and party colleagues in Parliament fought on those issues at that time. I remember working in John Hume’s office writing all sorts of letters to the Home Office. Of course, we were told that new facts and new evidence did not qualify as new facts and new evidence. Perhaps that issue still applies to clause 143. Even if amendment 95 were accepted, the question of what counts as a
“new or newly discovered fact”
still arises, although I hope that the wording of the amendment, which would provide that
“no reasonable court properly directed as to the law, could convict on the evidence now to be considered”,
would help. There were historical arguments about whether new evidence was indeed a new fact or a material consideration, and I would not want to legislate to produce more circular arguments or obfuscations like that for the future.
Clause 143 is pernicious. It seeks completely to reload the basic, long-standing presumption of innocence until proven guilty. It basically provides qualification of the notion of a miscarriage of justice, suggesting that when someone has suffered what most people would call a miscarriage of justice and when their conviction has, on subsequent judicial appraisal of relevant evidence, been overturned, they should still not be able to proclaim their innocence. There is an insinuation that if they were previously convicted, they are innocent and entitled to compensation as innocent only where they can prove that they are innocent “beyond reasonable doubt”.
For the people affected, many of their convictions will have taken place many years previously and they will be in no position to marshal all the evidence that could necessarily prove their innocence beyond what someone would call a reasonable doubt. Nobody has to
meet that criterion at their proper and due initial trial, so why should anybody have to do that to receive compensation after a conviction has been overturned? Compensation is not the only issue here because it is not the monetary value that motivates the fundamental objections to this proposal.
Before I became a Member in 2005, I worked on the cases of the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven when they still needed and wanted a full and proper proclamation of their innocence, not least because many sections of the media and others were retelling the slur that these people had somehow secured just a technical acquittal. Their conviction was quashed, but the insinuation remained that they were not really innocent. That problem arose from issues surrounding compensation and other factors.
I recall being asked by Gerry Conlon, a friend of mine and one of the Guildford Four, if I could get a direct and clear statement of apology and a proclamation of the innocence not just of himself but of his late father, Giuseppe Conlon. I was also asked the same by Sarah Conlon, Gerry’s mother and Giuseppe’s widow. It was plain that Gerry Conlon wanted that clear proclamation of their innocence for his mother, that his mother wanted it for Gerry, and, of course, that they both wanted it for Giuseppe.
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It is hugely important for people to be able to engage in the proper legal process in order to have their innocence properly affirmed. They should not have to engage in all sorts of ulterior processes to secure, for instance, declarations in the House of Commons or in the precincts of Parliament, which is what happened at the time to which I have referred. We must recognise that miscarriages of justice have had a fundamental impact not just on the people whose lives have been marred and blighted by years of jail and the ignominy that they and their families have suffered, but on the wider community—and not just in the context of British-Irish relations and all those historic difficulties.
It is mean-minded of the Government to use the Bill to try to qualify the definition of whether people have been victims of miscarriages of justice, and to impose an undue burden on them to prove their innocence “beyond reasonable doubt”. Those words were chosen very deliberately. How can any of us prove our innocence of anything beyond reasonable doubt? Many of us might be accused of saying things, insinuating things, meaning things, or doing things relating to our expenses or all sorts of other things, but it would be enormously difficult for us then to prove beyond reasonable doubt that we had not done those things, particularly if we had been subject to a lot of media reportage, profiling and distorted coverage. It is beyond me to imagine why the Government chose to use such wording.
In amendment 95, my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North and I seek to modify the damage done by clause 143, proposing that the words
“the person was innocent of the offence”
after the words
“if and only if the new or newly discovered fact shows beyond reasonable doubt that”
should be replaced by the words
“no reasonable court properly directed as to the law, could convict on the evidence now to be considered”.
I think that that is an important and measured qualification.
I also agree with what was said by the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark on behalf of the Joint Committee. In many respects, clause 143 as a whole is the problem. I certainly am not minded to become involved in a contest relating to whether the House should divide on whether to keep the whole clause or on whether to amend it in the way suggested by amendment 95. On the basis of what I have heard from Liberal Democrat Members, as well as the important statements that we have heard from the Opposition Front Bench, I will say that—although my party has no Members in the House of Lords, and will have none until it has become a reformed and democratic Chamber—if there are other worthy heads there that are able to concentrate on this clause in its fullest and important sense, I shall give them every encouragement to do so.
We cannot treat this issue lightly. The Government may say, “It is all about the compensation culture: it is simply about cutting costs.” They may say that they do not want compensation to be automatically provided in cases with which people might not be comfortable because they might find the recipient unattractive, and because it might relate to a crime about which there was a great deal of deep and understandable public feeling. However, none of those considerations should allow us to indulge a clause that would fundamentally tilt the presumption of innocence—that would tilt the balance away from someone’s guilt having to be proved beyond reasonable doubt. People who have been convicted and deemed guilty may be able to challenge that decision subsequently, but, even if they are released, they may in a sense be unable to escape from the original conviction.
Inherent in the Government’s proposal is the notion that the fact that someone is not guilty does not necessarily mean that that person is innocent, which is a very dangerous wedge to start inserting in public assumptions and perceptions. However, it is what we as legislators are being asked to do, and the hon. Member for Islington North and I tabled amendment 95 so that we could register our view properly today. We hope that it will be registered further, in terms such as those that we have already heard from the Opposition Front Bench and, indeed, from some on the Government Benches.
I hope that the Minister is sensitive to some of the issues that have been raised—not just in relation to cases that have already happened, but in relation to those that may happen in the future—and to the deep concern that is felt about the possibility that the “tilting” is part of some other ulterior agenda. This is certainly not something that we can allow to pass lightly, and I shall listen very carefully to what the Minister says.