Home Secretary wants to stop coroners sitting with juries
Another curtailment of rights in TWAT (The War Against Terror)
I am indebted to Dr. John Crippen, the NHS Blog Doctor for raising the issue of the rights of coroners sitting with juries, as another example of Labour’s fixation with breaking down historical institutions and curtailing civil liberties in the TWAT (The War Against Terror).
Provisions in the counter-terrorism bill, published last month, would allow home secretaries to replace coroners with their own appointees.
Crippen, writing in Centre Right says;
Coroners have always been a thorn in the side of the establishment. And, when they sit with a jury, they are nigh-on uncontrollable. That is always the trouble when you let independent professionals loose in a democratic country. Two years into World War Two, the case of Liversidge v Anderson was fought in open court. We must never forget Lord Atkin’s dissenting judgment, in which he told the Home Secretary, in no uncertain terms, that notwithstanding the Nazi threat, notwithstanding the Battle of Britain, he could not lock-up British citizens without giving reason.
Now the Home Secretary is taking statutory powers not only to suspend habeus corpus but to stop coroners’ courts sitting with juries. She is likely to exercise these powers in the case of terrorist deaths.
Why would the government not want a jury to decide the Jean Charles de Menezes case?
Having already removed the office of Lord Chancellor from the parliamentary and legal system, Labour is now launching another attack on centuries old traditions and common rights. By removing the ability of coroners to sit with a jury the investigation into the causes of death will become that much more difficult to pursue in certain cases, particularly if “selected” coroners are to become the norm.
Haven’t people like Gordon Brown, and Tony Blair before him, announced after terror attacks that we will never allow them to alter the British way of life?
