Justice for Megrahi (PE1370)
Item 3 is continuation of our consideration of petition PE1370, on the Megrahi conviction.
Last week we agreed to consider the matter following late receipt of the Lord Advocate’s latest response on the petition. Members have now had a chance to consider his response, along with further material that has been provided by the petitioners. Additional background information relating to our previous consideration of the petition has also been provided in members’ papers, as requested, together with extra papers—I know you like lots of papers—that came in late yesterday from the Lord Advocate’s office—although I believe that much of what has been attached was previously within the committee’s ken.
I invite members’ views on what to do with the petition.
I am happy to leave the petition open.
Is there anything else members wish to say about the petition?
Do we want more information on operation Sandwood and the timescale for it? I think that it would be appropriate to ask for that.
I am at a loss to know why we are not in receipt of specific responses to the questions that have been asked. They were legitimately posed. We read, for instance, that the Crown Office
“asked a Senior Prosecutor who has had no prior involvement in the Lockerbie Investigation and associated Prosecution to act as a conduit with the Senior Investigating Officer to ensure that access to any material that the Crown has, and that The Police Service of Scotland consider is necessary for full and thorough consideration of the allegations, is facilitated.”
Is that one and the same person that we are talking about in our papers? It would have been very helpful to know the identity of the individuals involved, or if not who they are specifically, who appointed them.
Basically, everything comes back to the questions that were legitimately asked. I cannot see why, rather than papers being delivered to the committee at the 11th hour—I appreciate the swift turnaround that was required from last week—we cannot get simple responses to the unambiguous questions that have been posed.
What are your questions, therefore?
My questions are those in annex A on pages 4 and 5 of paper 3. I am referring to the bullet-pointed questions.
Right. It is a public paper, so I do not need to go through the questions. Do members agree about the questions?
We have known about the questions for a little while. On 5 January we did not raise the issue.
Are you raising it now? I am trying to get consensus.
I would be in favour of taking no further action before dissolution, but without closing the petition. We should leave it for a future committee to decide what further action to take.
I would quite like to know the name of the independent counsel who has been appointed. We have not even found that out.
As we said at our previous meeting, this should be about process, not individuals. I am therefore quite happy to leave the matter open and take no further action.
I find it astonishing that an elected politician could say to a member of the public—one of their constituents—who has posed legitimate questions about process that we will pass this over until the end of May.
Hold on—
Through the chair, please, gentlemen.
Before I am attacked further, convener, I will repeat exactly what I said: this should be about process. We are agreed on that.
But this is process.
This is not about individuals. We made that very clear at our last meeting. I repeat: this should be about process, not individuals. We should leave the matter open, and leave it at that.
Do you want to know the timescale for the investigation and the progress of operation Sandwood?
I am happy that you have rephrased your question, convener, but I will leave the matter at that.
I am asking the committee whether it wishes to do that.
I am happy to leave it at that.
You are happy to find out the progress that has been made.
No.
So, you just want to leave things open and not do that.
I am happy to leave the petition open.
I do not actually agree with you. Could I hear some other voices? I think that there are one or two things that it would be fair for us to ask about, including the progress of operation Sandwood and who has been appointed independent Crown counsel. Why have we not found that out? It cannot be a secret. After that, we can continue the petition. That is fair enough—these are markers.
You do not agree, Christian.
I have made my point clearly.
Does anyone else wish to say anything?
Given that the committee will have only two more meetings after this, I am not really sure how much more we, rather than the successor justice committee, can achieve. If we ask the questions, what will we do with the responses?
The answers would be there for the successor committee. That is all that I am saying.
Dissolution is neither here nor there. We should pursue the matter with the same vigour as we would pursue it had we a year to go. If, at the end of the day, we bump up against the buffers, that is what happens, but it is incumbent on us to continue to pursue issues that have exercised us for so long.
Which are what? What do you want to pursue?
I want to pursue the points that you and John Finnie have already made.
Those are the bullet points in the paper.
Yes.
That is what you want to do—I will have to get some agreement from the committee on that.
It is quite important that we reach consensus on this. If the question is whether we are going to ask about operation Sandwood and who the independent Crown counsel is, I would say yes, in the spirit of compromise, but I am not sure that we should go through all the bullet points.
I feel a bit exasperated. We have just spent two hours—quite rightly—on the minutiae of legislation, on very detailed ideas and concepts and on the relationship with other legislation. This is a simple process—I absolutely agree with my colleagues that this is about process and not about individuals. I have spent a lot of time trying to understand the process, but I do not understand it; I just thought that colleagues on the Justice Committee would want that understanding. Instead of seeking to reinvent the wheel, I am simply suggesting that a very simple way of approaching this would be to secure very simple answers to the very simple questions that have been posed about the whole process. I am really at a loss to know what the problem is with that.
Rod Campbell has compromised a little about finding out who the independent counsel is, and I think that it is relevant to ask who appointed them. It is a huge problem for the Crown to investigate the Crown: I say to Christian Allard that that is a matter of process. We are talking about a very unusual circumstance. Do we want to ask who appointed the independent counsel and who the independent counsel is? Is that not fair enough? I do not think that there should be anything to hide.
I—
I am trying to get somewhere here, John.
To be honest, I do not think that the identity of the individual is necessarily pertinent.
So, we do not need to know the person’s identity.
We need to understand the process.
Can we settle for asking who appointed the independent counsel?
I have been very clear, convener—
I know that you have, but I am trying to get some consensus around the table; I want a position that the committee can agree to. I am not asking you to agree to absolutely everything, but if we all stick to black-and-white positions, we will not be able to move forward, and I do not know what we will do then.
Each time we agree about the process, there is a question of identifying somebody—
I have parked that.
Never from me.
Bear with me, Christian. I have parked that. I have said that all we want to know is what the process was for appointing the independent counsel. Shall we rephrase that?
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I do not know what other committee members think about our needing to know who the individual is. There is a place for the Justice Committee and there is a place for the Justice for Megrahi campaign. If I was involved with the Justice for Megrahi campaign, I would be interested in knowing that, but this is the Justice Committee.
It is not to do with that. We went through this last week, Christian. Let us imagine that some other petition had come to us. We are in the very strange situation of somebody having been appointed to look at the actions of the Crown Office. I have never see that before, and I do not know how we should deal with that. Is the Crown Office never to be investigated by anybody? Who holds the Crown Office to account? Those are the kind of questions that we are asking. Is that what you are looking for, John?
That is entirely what I am looking for, but I sense my colleague’s discomfort. If it helps him, we could rip the campaign name off the top of the petition and ask how we would proceed if it came from Joe Bloggs.
Many times, when cases have not been pursued, we have asked why the Crown Office has not pursued them. We have raised the matter before. This time, we are asking about the Crown Office itself.
I have written an article on who watches the Crown Office—it is not a new issue. We have had the petition for many years—it goes way back—and I would probably have closed it earlier. I have not deviated from the opinion that I have stated today: I think that, without closing the petition, we should leave it for a successor committee to decide on.
Because we are not going to get consensus on the petition, can we agree that we will find out about the progress of operation Sandwood and keep the petition open? It is up to individual members to pursue other issues themselves, if they wish to do that. I have to get some consensus in the committee. Do members agree to my suggestion?
I am quite happy with that.
Do you agree to that, Margaret?
In the interests of consensus, absolutely.
You are always good at that, Margaret, and you got a round of applause today—never let that be forgotten. You have superseded Margaret McDougall’s one liner that took the feet from under the chief constable.
It may not be all that you want, John, but do you agree to that suggestion?
Absolutely.
Okay. We will seek that information and keep the petition open. Thank you very much.