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Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for reinforcing that point, on which I attempted to extract more information from the Home Secretary. I am afraid that I did not get an answer however, and I too hope this might be explained further in the summing up. The 1949 Geneva conventions require us to seek out and prosecute absolutely anybody suspected of committing war crimes. Similar duties exist under the torture convention, where we also have a duty to apply criminal law uniformly. A special legal or procedural system for those cases that is different from the rest of criminal law could breach that obligation. Victims securing the arrest of visiting suspects fulfil an important rule-of-law purpose. No state inference should bar their access to courts. As Lord Wilberforce said in 1978, the right to bring private prosecutions remains"““a valuable constitutional safeguard against inertia or partiality on the part of the authority””." Lord Diplock similarly described it as"““a useful constitutional safeguard against capricious, corrupt or biased failure or refusal of those authorities to prosecute offenders against the criminal law””."