I completely agree with David Pannick’s view in the Times today: the Fayed farce shows us coroners need the discretion to decline to carry out an inquest in specific circumstances – where a death has already been properly investigated abroad, for instance, and when the public expense of an inquest cannot be justified.
We need a bit of caution about this, though: we don’t want a situation where the Army or rail companies can successfully argue that military boards of inquiry into deaths in, say, Afghanistan, or HSE investigations into rail crashes, are sufficient.
David Pannick, as usual, writes a good article. However, his argument begs the question of how do you know whether an inquest abroad was a “proper one.” Pannick provides no answer to that other than leave it to the Coroner. Do you have a list of “good”and “bad” countries? If nt this, on what criteria do you decide.
As regards inquests into “military” deaths, the government has already moved to have secret inquests with special Coroners and this will occur on the direction of a Minister. A Bill before Parliament will enable this to happen. Clearly they (or the USA) has been embarrassed by certain inquests. The answer is to “hush it all up.”
Let’s be more radical. Why on earth, except perhaps where there is some reason for thinking that Art 2 is involved, should an English coroner’s court inquire into a death abroad? The link between a body turning up here and the coroner’s jurisdiction is, in the modern world, a complete nonsense. When this bit of the Coroners Act was written (if that’s where the law is found), a body turning up on British soil was presumably a rare and unusual event. Now that bodies are commonly repatriated, it gives our most pointless of courts impressive courts an extensive and very peculiar jurisdiction indeed. Let’s scrap the law and start again.
Even where Art 2 is involved, which I suppose it is in the case of military deaths in Iraq, do we really think that the Oxfordshire coroner pootling around holding medieval inquests is a sensible use of anyone’s time or money?
@ Nicholas “do we really think that the Oxfordshire coroner pootling around holding medieval inquests is a sensible use of anyone’s time or money?”
I certainly do. Were it not for these inquests the MoD (and its Ministers) would never have been held to account for their incompetences and mendacity.
Perhaps you’d be pleased to see this scrapped. What would you propose in its place? Parliament has been entirely discredited as a means of ensuring Ministerial answerability. The judiciary is virtually the only remaining bastion of integrity. And the Government is in the business of destroying its independence.
Well said Unsworth ! On a number of posts on this blog I have used the phrase – “IF we had a true Parliament instead of a House of Muppets controlled by the executive ….” It is this failure of Parliament to hold Ministers to account which lies at the root of many problems in this country.
My apologies for this, but I do think it relevant to this discussion. It’s lifted from elsewhere, and was sent to me by someone directly involved:
“POLICE and the Crown Prosecution Service are taking legal advice on whether Geoff Hoon, the former defence secretary, could be held liable for a soldier’s death in Iraq.
They are considering a complaint that Hoon should be held criminally liable for failing to allow sufficient equipment to be sent to the Gulf in time for the start of the war in 2003.
The arguments against Hoon, who is now chief whip, will focus on the death of Sergeant Steven Roberts, 33, from Shipley, West Yorkshire, who was accidentally shot dead by his own men on March 24, 2003, while trying to deal with an Iraqi protester after being ordered to give his armour to another soldier because of delays in equipment arriving.
The decision to call in a senior barrister to discuss whether Hoon should be prosecuted follows a complaint to the police from Paul Gilbert, a Stafford councillor.
“The breach of the duty of care by Hoon is so great as to be characterised as gross negligence and therefore a crime,” said Gilbert in his letter to the police.
Some time ago during the course of private discussions I speculated as to whether such a challenge might be mounted and by whom. We shall see, but the prospect of the police and the CPS considering taking action against MoD is interesting – even though the outcome of such deliberations may be predictable. Maybe this is a test of the independence of all these parties.
Further reading at Mick Smith’s blog at The Times and ARRSE – the unofficial military forum.