Tag Archives: justice

Cara Jenkinson

Opinion: If we remove prison as an option for drugs possession, savings must go to boost probation service

By Cara Jenkinson | Mon 18th August 2014 - 1:29 pm

Wormwood Scrubs prison - Some rights reserved by TheGooglyAs a magistrate in North London, I welcome the recent Liberal Democrat proposal to remove prison as a sentencing option for drug possession. I have seen so many defendants who are in and out of prison, never breaking the depressing cycle of re-offending. However to keep drug addicts out of prison we will need to make sure that the alternatives work.

Currently it is very rare that first time offenders accused of drug possession would be sent to prison With first time offenders, the …

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Caron Lindsay

Why we need Liberal Democrats: Consensual Stop and search of under 12s in Scotland halted

By Caron Lindsay | Fri 20th June 2014 - 10:30 am

Police stop and searchThe Scottish Liberal Democrats aren’t in Government at the moment. Despite that, the small Parliamentary group has had quite an impact in the past 3 years. Willie Rennie has had Salmond squirming at First Minister’s Questions over his associations with Rupert Murdoch and has been pivotal in securing extra funds for colleges, childcare and free school meals.

Back in January, it came to light that 500 children under 10 had been stopped and searched by Police in 2010. That’s bad enough. Last year that figure was just 88 …

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Julian Huppert

Julian Huppert MP writes…Let’s bring the “polluter pays” principle to government decision making

By Julian Huppert | Tue 6th May 2014 - 5:49 pm

imageAll too often Government departments get decisions wrong. Most notorious are the Home Office and the Department of Work and Pensions. Many people will be well aware of the anguish faced by those awaiting Employment and Support Allowance appeals, and the same is true for those waiting to see if they can stay in the country, or bring in a spouse.

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Alison McInnes MSP

Alison McInnes MSP writes…The Scottish Justice Secretary is wrong to say stop and search is an operational matter

By Alison McInnes MSP | Sun 6th April 2014 - 10:46 am

Police stop and search1st April 2014 marked the 1st anniversary of Police Scotland, a single national police force that replaced our 8 regional forces.

The Scottish Liberal Democrats were the only group in the Scottish Parliament to oppose the national force from the outset.

One of the key strengths of Scotland’s policing up until then had been its local foundations.  Funded by local councils, managed by local officers and officials, accountable to locally elected representatives, responsive to local needs.

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Caron Lindsay

Stop and search nonchalance from Justice Secretary shows why Scotland needs the Liberal Democrats

By Caron Lindsay | Wed 26th March 2014 - 2:32 pm

Police BrutalityIn January, I wrote about the worryingly high police stop and search figures in Scotland, which is proportionately much higher than in England includes over 500 children under 10 years old.

Now it transpires that these figures may not be accurate. And may be made up. According to the Edinburgh Evening News:

Official figures show a huge number of incidents where stop-and-search powers have been used since the creation of a single police force. Critics claim officers are under pressure because the number of stop-searches has been made a “key

…

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Opinion: Tell us your views on a fair, liberal criminal justice system

By Geoff Payne | Wed 5th March 2014 - 4:51 pm

The prevention, detection and prosecution of crime and the sentencing and rehabilitation of offenders is one of the fundamental roles of the government and the independent judiciary. It is also something that matters enormously to the electorate. No-one wants to be a victim of crime. No-one wants to be accused of a crime they did not commit.  Many offenders would want to rehabilitate themselves and live a decent life in the future.

For too long, crime policy has suffered from an obsession shared by successive Labour and Tory Governments of seeking to be ever tougher than the last and yet completely …

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Caron Lindsay

Willie Rennie warns against SNP “dismantling of Scottish justice system”

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 2nd February 2014 - 2:05 pm

The other day, someone said in a comment on here that the SNP seemed like a liberal party. I don’t doubt that there are liberals in it, but they are not evident at the higher levels and particularly in regard to anything the Scottish government does in relation to justice.

Kenny MacAskill, the Justice Secretary has presided over a massively disproportionate use of stop and search powers, agreed to appalling overuse of solitary confinement for vulnerable female prisoners, failed to be mortified after a second damning inspection report at Scotland’s women’s prison, Cornton Vale and is now

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Linda Jack

Opinion: Justice for Simon Hughes

By Linda Jack | Thu 19th December 2013 - 5:45 pm

As someone who has never exactly been a supporter, there have been very few bright spots in the otherwise suffocatingly dark firmament which is the Coalition Government.  One was and is the appointment of Norman Lamb as Care Minister who has been doing a remarkable job, also the undoubted achievements of Lynne Featherstone.  So the news yesterday that Simon Hughes has been appointed a justice minister was one of those rare occasions when some of my perennial despair was tinged with just a little hope.

I have a lot of time for Tom McNally and I think he …

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Julian Huppert

Julian Huppert writes… Fixing the women’s prison estate

By Julian Huppert | Fri 25th October 2013 - 2:05 pm

After only  a couple of weeks with women offenders under his remit, Liberal Democrat Lord and Minister in the Ministry of Justice, Tom McNally has this morning announced what may be a step-change in the way Britain handles the women’s estate.

Six years after the Corston review, which bemoaned the lack of a tailored and differentiated approach to dealing with female offenders, we are finally seeing her recommendations being implemented. Corston called for an approach that recognised and reacted to the needs of women in the prison estate. Following on from this our Conference called for a radical change in the way women were handled throughout the criminal justice system and in Government we have delivered on your demands.

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Lord Tom McNally

Lord Tom McNally writes…Liberal Democrats secure best possible deal for collaborative EU justice

By Lord Tom McNally | Mon 15th July 2013 - 6:53 pm

The Commons votes tonight on whether the government should exercise the impenetrably-named ‘EU Justice and Home Affairs mass opt-out’.

While it sounds dry and technical, this decision is hugely significant as EU ‘JHA measures’ have been crucial in securing justice for hundreds of British victims of crime. These instruments have been prominent in the extradition of attempted London bomber Hussain Osman from Italy under a European Arrest Warrant, in coordinating via Eurojust the investigation into the Annecy killings and in Europol’s EU-wide investigation, ‘Operation Veto’, into match-fixing and corruption in sport.

The mass opt-out is not an ingenious new attempt by the …

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Julian Huppert

Julian Huppert MP writes…A credible alternative to prison has always been a Liberal Democrat priority

By Julian Huppert | Mon 25th March 2013 - 8:43 am

For decades British Governments have been locking up criminals for 12 months or less, to watch them reoffend straight after they leave prison. Worse than that, the policy is costly, and holds little public confidence.

But when you look at how we treat women offenders, the situation is even worse.

Almost half of women serving 12 months or less will reoffend within the next year. And of all women in prison, 6 in 10 are there for six months or less; the vast majority of whom have committed non-violent offences. The last Government’s response was to increase the female prison …

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Opinion: Who’s the odd one out?

By Charles Beaumont | Wed 17th October 2012 - 2:57 pm

Name the odd one out: Timothy Edmonds (convicted paedophile), Hussain Osman (convicted terrorist), Julian Assange (Wikileaks founder wanted for questioning by Swedish police) and Abu Hamza (Egyptian-born militant Islamist now facing terrorism charges in a New York court). Not too difficult – it’s Abu Hamza, who was extradited to the USA after an eight-year legal battle.

The other three are currently, or have been in the past, the subject of European arrest warrants. All of them, if Theresa May gets her way, would have been able to evade justice for as long as

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NewsHound

Stephen Lawrence – “Some justice at last”

By NewsHound | Tue 3rd January 2012 - 3:43 pm

The BBC reports the stunning news:

Two men have been convicted of the racist murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence, 18 years after he was stabbed to death at a south London bus stop.

Gary Dobson and David Norris were found guilty by an Old Bailey jury after a trial based on forensic evidence.

Scientists found a tiny blood stain on Dobson’s jacket that could only have come from Mr Lawrence.

As he was led away, Dobson told the jury they had condemned an “innocent man”. Sentencing will be on Wednesday.

Stephen’s parents, Doreen and Neville, wept in court as the jury found

…

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Linda Jack

Opinion: A real opportunity to Make Justice Work

By Linda Jack | Fri 7th October 2011 - 11:53 am

One of the highlights of conference for me was the breakfast roundtable organised by Make Justice Work. As conference goers and fringe organisers will know, getting one MP along is a challenge, managing to attract three must be close to a record! So it was a demonstration of the commitment our party has to reforming the criminal justice system that Justice minister Tom McNally, chair of the Justice Select Committee Alan Beith and member of the Home Affairs Select Committee Julian Huppert, all attended.

For those of you who don’t know the organisation, it was founded by Roma Hooper to …

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Stephen Tall

Ken Clarke: the sixth Lib Dem cabinet minister

By Stephen Tall | Sun 3rd October 2010 - 2:15 pm

Part of the Coalition deal was that the Lib Dems secured five cabinet posts, a number in proportion to the party’s number of MPs. But there was another appointment which can be counted a success of the Coalition from the Lib Dem perspective: the appointment of Ken Clarke as secretary of state for justice.

It’s a success on two levels.

First, Ken Clarke is a liberal Tory — so for the first time in 17 years (since Ken Clarke was home secretary in John Major’s government) the UK has a believer in restorative justice setting government policy. After the right-wing …

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Opinion: Democracy, the Rule of Law and New Labour

By Martin Land | Mon 14th September 2009 - 6:32 pm

Back in the 1980s my employer, encouraged by some important orders I’d picked up in what we then called Eastern Europe, asked me to try to build up a distribution network in as many countries as I could. In creating this customer base, I made a number of good friends in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary and Yugoslavia. It was good business, though never easy, and my sympathy with the many friends I made there led me to take more time over it than perhaps I should have.

I’m pleased to say that after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I was personally able to help a number of my old contacts with the small amounts of capital needed to start up their own businesses and keep up contact with many of them even now. Sad to say some of my Yugoslav friends disappeared into the tragedy of the Civil War, though I still keep in touch with Slovenes who escaped the worst of it.

In those dark days in the 1980s conversations often turned to politics. Once we had carefully sounded each other out, it was a topic that could not be easily avoided. It was obvious that the system had failed, though no one I ever spoke to thought it would go and certainly not in the manner it did. I felt it had 10 years; they were generally far less sanguine.

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Tim Connolly

Opinion: Youth justice – a golden opportunity for the Lib Dems

By Tim Connolly | Wed 9th September 2009 - 2:30 pm

Youth justice has risen, zombie-like, from the place unloved political issues go to die. In July, the Government published an interim report on The Youth Crime Action Plan, its “comprehensive, cross-government analysis of what the government is going to do to tackle youth crime.”

This prompted vigorous activity from the think-tanks and NGOs, and a predictable silence from the dead who may live again, aka the Conservative Party.

Last week, the Liberal Democrats published data showing that the number of 10 to 12 year olds convicted of a criminal offence rose by 87.2% between 1997 and 2007. Nick Clegg, remarking on the figures, argued that:

It is a disgrace the Government spends eleven times more locking up our young people than it does on backing projects to stop them getting involved in crime in the first place.”

Unless you happen to be keen on nineteenth century penal philosophy, Nick’s comment seems to make excellent sense. I would suggest, however, that it is, at best, carelessly imprecise. At worst, it indicates a refusal to challenge the prevailing conservative narrative on youth crime. Given recent reporting of events in Doncaster, a measured rebuttal is more critical than ever.

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Stephen Glenn

Haggis, Neeps and Liberalism #7: The Megrahi Documents

By Stephen Glenn | Wed 2nd September 2009 - 12:45 pm

The Megrahi case has ripped apart the peace of the Scottish Parliamentary recess, with even some former Lib Dem leaders taking a differing view to our leader in Holyrood. Today the UK Government and Scottish Parliament have released papers relating to the discussions that have gone one over the last two years. It ranges from correspondence between Westminster and Holyrood, to memos of meetings with Libyan officials, to the compassionate release request listing medical conditions.

These start chronologically with the first letter from then-Lord Chnacellor Lord (Charles) Falconer to Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond outlining the Memorandum of Understanding that Westminster had set up with Libya regarding a number of judicial issues. The Memorandum was drawn up to look at increasing bilateral co-operation covering, amongst other things, commercial and criminal issues. The legal issues were not exclusively about Mr Al Megrahi, but looking at the bigger picture of co-operation between the two nations at large. However, Lord Falconer did say that nothing could be ruled in or out, but that co-operation and consultation between Westminster and Holyrood would be carried forward.

However, it the path of the UK’s justice secretary Jack Straw’s correspondence that sheds a lot of light on the situation, especially considering the Labour response in Holyrood.

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David Howarth

David Howarth MP writes… My top priorities as Lib Dem shadow secretary of state for justice

By David Howarth | Fri 13th February 2009 - 5:05 pm

The main responsibilities of the Ministry of Justice are the criminal justice system, including prisons and probation, and constitutional reform. Crime has not been seen as a political strength for us in the past, but I believe that it could be, because we have very distinctive things to say. Constitutional reform is one of our traditional strengths, but the task there is to make it relevant to current politics.

There is a crisis in the criminal justice system of staggering proportions. The prison population is at a record high, and is eating up £ billions in public expenditure. 70% of …

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