contribution by Spencer Wright

In a dusty corner of the Coalition’s new Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill lie a series of amendments that really have failed to gain the mass audience they deserve. Hidden away under a rather dimly lit “Miscellaneous” sub-heading, is Section 151 – “Restriction on issue of arrest warrants in private prosecutions”.

The origins of that section lie in events a year ago, when an arrest warrant was issued by a senior judge in Westminster against former Israeli Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, for her part in the attack against Gaza in 2008/9.

Despite a clear UN investigation ruling, ministers weren’t interested. They had declared the warrant an “embarrassment” before even having the time to review the evidence presented. Their real concern was not war crimes but to remain “a friend of Israel”.

The previous government’s proposals drew strong condemnation from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, REDRESS, Justice, FIDH, and Global Witness. All saw the very real danger laced in mixing politics and justice, and in giving an arm of the government a “public interest” get-out clause for prosecutions presented against suspected war criminals.

Putting aside the politicised origins of this sudden yearning to change the law, the amendments against private prosecutors wouldn’t seem so bad had public bodies been proactive in bringing about prosecutions themselves.

Figures published in last week’s Guardian however have shown a complete failure on this front.

Britain is thought to have 383 individuals suspected of war crimes, torture and/or genocide walking free on our streets, and the current government is worse than apathetic…

They are believed to include senior officials from Saddam Hussein’s regime, a senior Afghan intelligence service official alleged to be involved in torture and a former police chief from the Democratic Republic of Congo, who confessed in a radio interview to overseeing torture.

Despite the introduction of laws to enable more domestic prosecutions of suspected war criminals, not a single case has been prosecuted in the UK courts.

Since the end of World War II, the UK has seen only two criminals prosecuted for crimes considered within the remit of Universal Jurisdiction.

As a result of this moral apathy we’ve come to live in a very strange paradox: our armed forces are engaged in more military conflicts since 1945. The removal of despots, mass-murders, and torturers was often a cited goal.

Yet whilst we hunt down Serbian ethnic-cleansers, Afghan warlords, Iraqi dictators, and African gangsters abroad, we have failed to act on those living right within our own borders.

It is clear there has been a failure somewhere in pushing public bodies to carry out prosecutions. David Cameron, of all people, should be keen to encourage private legal professionals to take up where the state has failed.

The Section 151 amendments must be abolished and we must have a serious cross-party debate on our failure to confront those suspected of these grave crimes.

Reader comments

1. Liberal Conspiracy

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2. Tamsin Dunedain

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3. Bristol Green Party

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6. Zoe Broome

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7. writingspence

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8. Miranda

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9. Pucci Dellanno

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10. Courts Entertainment… « Back Towards The Locus

    [...] more difficult to move to prosecute such knaves. An observant commenter at Liberal Conspiracy has found the press release with which those rulings sailed forth… …the system is open to [...]

11. Daniel Pitt

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12. Why Cameron’s speech on terrorism puts us more in danger | Liberal Conspiracy

    [...] “If we want secure progress in the Middle East, we should work with Saudi Arabia,” Blair told Jeremy Paxman. Similarly, if the fascist from Israel, Avigdor Liberman, comes here, this government is not going to do anything to him. In fact they’re making it easy for war criminals to come here. [...]

13. criticalpraxis

    RT @libcon: The UK a safe-haven for terrorists? Try war criminals http://bit.ly/dWEzsW

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