Defendant Anonymity

Rehman Chishti Excerpts

Thursday 8th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Rehman Chishti (Gillingham and Rainham) (Con)]

I cannot hope to match the rhetoric of the new Members who have spoken before me with such great passion in their maiden speeches. I thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for giving me the opportunity to speak in this debate. I am not quite the last of the new intake of Members to get off the mark, although the list of those who have not done so is gradually diminishing. May I also congratulate you, Mr Deputy Speaker, on the excellent and fair way in which you have presided over this Chamber?

I wish to start my maiden speech by paying tribute to my predecessor, Paul Clark, who was elected to this House in 1997, when he overturned a 16,000-plus Conservative majority. Paul was a local boy, who grew up in Gillingham and cared passionately about Gillingham and Rainham. He served on the Back Benches of this House, as well as on the Front Benches as a Transport Minister. I wish him well in whatever the future holds for him.

It is a great privilege and honour to represent Gillingham and Rainham, which has been my home since I was six- years-old; I attended Richmond infant school, Napier primary school, Fort Luton high school for boys and then the Chatham grammar school for girls sixth form—yes, I did say Chatham grammar school for girls. Being the only boy in a class of 20 girls has its challenges, but I must say that it was an excellent experience. In all, I was very fortunate to have some dedicated teachers throughout my education, who inspired me to be the first in my family to go to university. I was able to read law at the university of Wales in Aberystwyth, which led me to qualify as a barrister, and this firmly instilled in me the values of fighting for justice, both as a defence and prosecuting advocate.

Gillingham and Rainham is a great constituency. Even in 55BC, when conquering Britain and passing through the area, Julius Caesar paid tribute to the men of Kent as the most civilised—I agree with him entirely. The towns, which have strong naval and military ties, are home to the Royal Engineers and are steeped in history. Both General Gordon and Lord Kitchener have links with the Royal School of Military Engineering. Currently, the Royal Engineers have two regiments serving in Afghanistan, and our constituency is very proud of the brave and courageous men and women who are there on active service. Many Victoria crosses, from both world wars, have been awarded to those with connections to Gillingham and Rainham, notably Major James McCudden from the first world war and Lieutenant Eugene Esmonde, of the Naval Air Service, from the second world war.

Although 400 years of naval heritage presence has now gone, it is still a matter of pride that Lord Nelson joined his first ship in the very dockyard where his famous flagship Victory was built. All that makes me very proud to represent Gillingham and Rainham, but there is also an international link, because Will Adams, who travelled to Japan in 1598, was the first British sailor to travel to Japan—he was also from Gillingham.

It would be remiss of me not to mention that Gillingham is home to a great football team, the Gills, although I have to say that watching the Gills is a bit like living life on the edge—one just never knows what is going to happen next. This is often reported in the excellent local newspapers, the Medway Messenger, Medway News, and Your Medway.

Gillingham and Rainham are part of the Medway unitary authority, an efficient, well-run Conservative council, which for the past 10 years has been very effectively led by Councillor Rodney Chambers and its chief executive, Neil Davies. I am very much looking forward to 2012 and the Queen’s jubilee, when I hope that Medway will rightly be given city status.

As a former barrister who both prosecuted and defended in criminal cases at all levels and who passionately believes in obtaining justice for the victims of crime, I am delighted to make my maiden speech in this debate on something that has rightly for many years now concerned this House, namely bringing to justice those who commit sexual offences, which are some of the most serious crimes on the statute book. In so doing, we must take care when addressing and balancing the competing interests of the victim against the rights of a defendant, who stands accused and is innocent until proven guilty.

One of the foremost issues that needs to be urgently considered is the low conviction rate in such cases, upon which considerable work has been done by successive Governments. However in so doing, we may have unwittingly crossed the line while balancing that issue against not only the right of the defendant to a fair trial, but, more controversially, the thorny question as to whether there should be a right—and if so, to what extent it should apply—in relation to the protection of the identity of defendants accused of and charged with sexual offences of all categories of such serious crimes.

In particular, recent experience has demonstrated that there are, unfortunately, occasions when defendants have, often for myriad complex reasons, been unjustly and falsely accused of sexual crimes. Extreme suffering is caused to victims as well as to those falsely accused in these cases, thus it is necessary to address these questions and face the challenges that they present head on. The low conviction rate in cases involving sexual offences is thought by many who practise in this field to be often due to the length of time between the commission of the offence and the date of trial. This not only leads to injustice in relation to memory recall, but causes considerable additional suffering to the victim while they await resolution of the same.

Some European jurisdictions have sought to address these issues by designating certain courts as exclusive rape and domestic violence courts, solely concerned with the hearing of such cases. Those courts are specifically designed to hear video evidence, the staff are sympathetically trained and the courts are victim-friendly—for example, they ensure that the risk of accused and accuser unwittingly meeting is reduced to a minimum. As a result, cases are heard within a very short time of allegations being made, evidence is fresh and the statistics demonstrate that conviction rates have risen.

The needs of true victims in allegations of sexual offences are always in the forefront of our minds when we legislate in this House, just as they are uppermost in the minds of those on whom we rely to dispense justice fairly on a daily basis in our courts: the judiciary of England and Wales. Our judiciary have been admired for generations and used as a model in many evolving democracies. We are justly proud of their work and it is time that we acknowledged our faith in them by restoring to the courts some of the important discretion that had traditionally always been entrusted to them by this House, but that has, unfortunately, been eroded by the previous Government in many areas, for example, in sentencing policy.

The effect on those falsely accused of serious sexual offences by the publication of their names and the revelation of their identities in the media can have long-term and far-reaching disastrous unintended consequences. In April, a taxi driver who worked for a firm in my constituency was cleared of rape at Maidstone Crown court. The story had been reported on the front page of the Medway Messenger, the largest circulating local newspaper in the area. It was only on the day of the trial—months later—with the defendant waiting in anguish, that the two supposed victims admitted that they had made up and falsely invented the serious allegation in order to avoid having to pay a taxi fare. They were later jailed for two years. The consequences for the wrongly accused defendant have been nothing short of disastrous as a result of the publication of his identity in the media. The concept of “mud sticks” is alive and kicking. He and others like him in the future deserve some measure of protection, as I believe we still have a system of justice in this country, of which we are justly proud, in which the accused is innocent until proved guilty on conviction by his peers. If safeguards are required to reinforce that in sexual offences cases until conviction, in order to balance these competing interests, they should be put in place as a matter of urgency.

I immediately acknowledge the arguments in favour of the publication of the identities of those accused of serious sexual offences, such as that might encourage others to come forward. However, that approach does fly in the face of the presumption of innocence and presumes that anyone accused has done this before. We should examine the statistics carefully in trying to balance these crucial and diametrically opposed interests. Neither should be sacrificed in the interests of the other without the most careful consideration.

Section 39 of the Children and Young Persons Act 1933 has served us well in relation to the publication of the name, address or any other particulars calculated to lead to the identification of any child or young person who is involved in criminal proceedings, including those on sexual offences. A court has complete discretion to hear anybody in support of or in opposition to an application pursuant to the section and consideration should be given to the extension of it automatically to include all those accused of serious sexual offences, allowing a judge to lift such a restriction in appropriate cases until conviction. A restriction until charge does not go far enough, as the test for charging is a “reasonable prospect of conviction” and thus far lower than the standard required for conviction by a jury.

In other words, we should trust our judiciary to maintain the balance in any case, having carefully considered the competing arguments. We must also do everything we can to bring to justice those who commit such serious crimes.