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Criminal Evidence (Witness Anonymity) Bill

That may be so, but the point was absent from the argument of those who said that the importance of the principle of equality of arms closed the argument as to whether, where an application for an order was made by the defence, the real identity of the witness for the defence should be disclosed to the court but not to the prosecution. There may well be cases, but I have never heard of one, in which the character of the prosecutor is called into account. It would be extraordinary were that to be the case. Moreover, those acting down the years on behalf of defendants quite properly and rightly have argued that there should be no equality of treatment when it comes to the provision of evidence to the other side. So we have rules under our system whereby not only does the prosecution obviously have to lay the full details of the case that it is going to make in open court before the defence, but it has to disclose sometimes mountains of unused prosecution evidence to the defence. No such equivalent duty is on the defendant, and notwithstanding efforts that have been made by the previous Administration and this one to ensure that the defence ambush the prosecution, and the increasing concerns of the courts to see those rules properly applied, there is and can never be equality there. I will deal with what is at the heart of amendment No. 20. There will be rare cases in which the defence properly feels that it should make an application for a witness anonymity order for a defence witness. I guess that the most likely example that could arise is where there is an argument between co-accused. The defence will come forward with its application to the court. It is of great importance that the court knows who the person is. That will be disclosed to the courts even under amendment No. 20, but the court also has to know a good deal about the witness before it can come to a view. The court has no information about the witness. How could it? The only way in which the court could obtain that information is from the prosecutors, who in turn would have to obtain it from the police. On what other basis could the court learn about the antecedents of the witness, who may well have kept them from the defendant? The antecedents may be incomplete. Those of us who have to deal routinely, as we all do in the House, with constituents who have criminal records never cease to be amazed at the way in which they forget about the most egregious convictions on their record. They remember only convictions of the most trivial nature. Indeed, recently I met a man who was applying for a job in the public service. He had a conviction years ago for being drunk and disorderly and he told me in front of a witness, who does not need to remain anonymous, that it was his sole conviction, so I wrote a gentle, but non-committal, letter. Upon further inquiry by me, it turned out that he did indeed have a conviction for being drunk and disorderly a long time ago, but he also had a recent conviction for quite a serious robbery. When he came back to see me, aggrieved that I had not been able to get him the post in the public service, he said that he had forgotten about that conviction and that in any event it was rather trivial. That sort of thing goes on frequently, so the police would have to make inquiries in such cases.