Miscarriages of Justice (Aftercare) (PE477)
Item 4 is consideration of petitions. I refer members to the note that has been prepared by the clerk and which sets out the background to recent developments in relation to petition PE477 by the Miscarriages of Justice Organisation, or MOJO. I refer members to the correspondence that has been circulated as a late paper. There is also a covering letter and research by MOJO that might be of interest. Do members have any comments?
Members indicated agreement.
Family Law (PE770)
I refer members to the note that sets out the background to petition PE770 by Patricia Orazio. We have seen the petition before and we agreed that it would be best to consider it alongside the Family Law (Scotland) Bill. In view of that, the recommendation is that we keep the petition open and consider it at stage 1 of the bill. I invite members to comment.
We should wait for the bill.
Agreed.
There are some recommendations in the petition that match some of the issues that members have raised about the use of mediation and family law centres, and about access to children and how that is dealt with. It is a pertinent petition and it is also welcome. One suggestion is that we should pass the petition to the Executive for comment. Although we can put questions to the minister anyway, we have the option of seeking a direct response. Alternatively, we could refer to the petition as the stage 1 process gets under way.
I agree that the petition is pertinent to work that we will be doing. Given that we will call witnesses to speak on the issues that are raised, it is important that we run the petition alongside our consideration of the bill. It might be useful for us to pass the petition to the Executive so that the minister, when he appears before the committee, will have the opportunity to respond to it, along with all the other evidence that will have been collected, which—judging by the two files that we saw last week—will be rather a lot.
It is worth noting that much of the subject will be considered at stage 1. I agree with Mary Mulligan that there is a case for passing the petition to ministers so that they can address the questions that will come up during our evidence taking, especially in the light of the information that we were provided with the other day, although I do not claim to have read it all yet. There is a case for going that extra step and asking the ministers to respond directly to the points that have been made.
There is no disagreement to that sensible suggestion. We will send the petition to the Executive and inform it that we will raise some of the issues in the petition during stage 1 consideration of the Family Law (Scotland) Bill, so that ministers can think about their responses.
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