Female Genital Mutilation

Lord Morris of Aberavon Excerpts

Thursday 11th December 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Morris of Aberavon (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Baroness on raising this issue. On Tuesday the House debated judicial review and its importance in ensuring that Ministers act according to law. In a country without a Bill of Rights, this is an essential cog to uphold the rule of law, as the House decided overwhelmingly. In my short speech I talked about how a government department that I was responsible for reacted to an adverse decision of the courts, and the non-statutory inquiry I set up, as Attorney-General, following criticism of the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Crown Prosecution Service.

I am confident that the current Director of Public Prosecutions, whom I know, with her long experience of prosecuting, can be relied upon to fulfil the proper tests for prosecution: the public interest one and the evidential one. But you cannot make bricks without straw. I think that the public interest test is clear. However, there seems, from the paucity of prosecutions, to be substantial difficulties in the presentation of evidence. Do the difficulties lie with the families, with the victims, with the medical profession? If it is with the medical profession, where is the Hippocratic oath? If there is fault, where are the disciplinary procedures of the medical profession?

According to the Times, yesterday the Home Secretary said:

“Doctors who perform cosmetic vagina surgery could be committing a criminal offence”.

She added that that would be a matter for the courts to decide. However, if there are hardly any cases for the courts to decide, how is the rule of law being complied with? The Home Secretary also said that,

“prosecutions were already possible under 2003 legislation which strengthened the ban on FGM”.

Well, it is good to know the obvious. In my view, it is high time that there was a high-powered inquiry, with the co-operation of the medical profession, as to where and what the problem is.

In my time as Attorney-General I had regular meetings with the Director of Public Prosecutions, week in, week out, when we discussed significant and important cases. However, the decision to prosecute or not was for the DPP alone. Given the concern that so few cases are coming before the courts, and that there are prima facie cases that the rule of law is being flouted, how many times has the issue been raised in the regular meetings of the Attorney-General and the director? I have no doubt, given the significance of concern over this issue, that had I been in that chair, I would have raised it with my DPP, and I am sure that my DPPs would have raised it with me.