High Court Judgment (John Downey)

Debate between Nigel Mills and Mark Durkan

Thursday 27th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Nigel Mills]

I am grateful to the Secretary of State for that clarification. That still leaves me in a situation where it is hard to understand the purpose of the letter, if it was not meant to be something one could rely on. This gentleman was carrying this letter around with him every time he entered the UK. Why would he do that if it could be superseded at some point?

[Mark Durkan]

If we are to place any burden on what the Secretary of State has just said, does that not create a very serious danger that the case law arising from this case in future will be that anybody can claim an abuse of process based on any mistake in communication they received from a Government official at any level?

[Nigel Mills]

Yes, there is a real question about what the legal status of the letters is now. We can argue about whether they were intended to be amnesties. The question has now become: has this judgment somehow elevated their status to something that was not intended?

The end of paragraph 45 of the Downey judgment refers to a letter sent by the then Prime Minister, which said:

“The Government is committed to dealing with the difficulty as soon as possible, so that those who, if they were convicted would be eligible under the early release scheme are no longer pursued”.

That is basically saying that somebody who could have been prosecuted and would have got a two-year sentence would now no longer be pursued. I am not sure how I can construe that as just being a factual statement. It appears that the intention of the Prime Minister at the time was to give some assurance that people who had gone on the run would not be prosecuted in that situation. That strikes me as being an amnesty under any other name. As the old saying goes: if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck. This looks very much like it was intended to be an amnesty.