A denial of justice and Megrahi not proved to be guilty, says English QC

[The following are extracts from an item headed Megrahi release and the House of Lords which was posted on this blog on this date five years ago:]

Two short debates were held yesterday in the House of Lords on matters related to the compassionate release of Abdelbaset Megrahi.

The first arose out of a question asked by Lord Pannick QC: "To ask Her Majesty’s Government why they did not make representations to the Scottish Secretary for Justice on whether Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi should be released from prison on compassionate grounds." The answer and the ensuing interchanges can be read here. One exchange reads as follows:

Lord Lester of Herne Hill: My Lords, I should declare a professional interest as the former co-counsel for Mr al-Megrahi in his unsuccessful application to the European Court of Human Rights. In the interests of justice and for the sake of the Lockerbie families, would the Government now seek to persuade the Scottish Executive to set up a full judicial inquiry into the matters raised by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission and the UN observer, Professor Köchler, about a possible miscarriage of justice and abuses in the investigation, prosecution and trial?

Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead: My Lords, as yet the British Government have made no decisions on these matters. The Lockerbie investigation took place and the result was that al-Megrahi was imprisoned in Scotland under that legal system. That remains the case and nothing can change in terms of what is possible from the investigation. The Libyans paid substantial compensation to the Lockerbie victims, but we accept that that is no justification.

The second debate arose out of the repetition in the Lords of the statement that had earlier been made in the Commons by the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband. The statement and the debate to which it gave rise can be read here. One exchange reads as follows:

Lord Lester of Herne Hill: My Lords, as I mentioned at Questions, I disclose my professional interest in having acted as co-counsel in the claim by Mr Megrahi to the European Court of Human Rights, which got nowhere. Since then I have had no professional interest in the case. However, in the work that I did on it, which lasted several weeks, I went through the whole of the transcripts and read the appellate judgment, and I have to say that I came to the conclusion, entirely objectively and working with Scottish counsel, that there had been a denial of justice and that Mr Megrahi had not been proved to be guilty. When I then read the summary of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission report, which my noble friend referred to just now, and realised that it had come to the same conclusion, I was very disturbed.

I shall deal with a couple of points in addition to those that have been made by my noble friend Lord Thomas of Gresford. First, will the Government please give an assurance that they will consent to the publication of the whole report? The commission does not have the power to do so itself. If the Scottish Executive or Scottish Parliament ask them to, will the Government consent to the publication of all the report so that we can see what its grounds are for believing that there may have been a miscarriage of justice?

Secondly, I am very concerned about the circumstances in which Megrahi was persuaded to drop his appeal and to go and die in Libya. I saw him in Barlinnie myself. I would like to know, and I would like the Government to find out whether, when he was visited in prison, it was made clear to him that if he dropped his appeal he would be allowed to go and die in Libya, so that there would then be no appeal and the relatives—Dr Swire and the others—would never know the truth. That is very important to them, and they have written to me about it. I would therefore like an assurance that there was no quid pro quo and no pressure put upon him. The Government may not know the answer, but they should find out. Was any pressure put on Megrahi that he would be sent to die in Libya only if he dropped the appeal?

Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead: On the last point, I am not aware of what the answer might be. We will ask for some advice on whether anyone has been asking those questions and, if so, I will respond to the question that the noble Lord raises.

On the issue of an independent inquiry, I have to keep repeating that is not really for us to say whether that will happen.

The run-up to Megrahi's first appeal

[On this date in 2001, various news agencies were reporting on the preliminary hearing due to be held later that week at Camp Zeist in connection with Abdelbaset Megrahi’s appeal against his conviction in January that year. What follows is a digest of these reports, taken from The Pan Am 103 Crash Website which was run by Safia Aoude:]

Libyan Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi is due to appear before a Scottish appeals court in the Netherlands Monday to try to overturn a life sentence for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. The preliminary hearing at Camp Zeist in the central Netherlands will deal solely with administrative matters before the actual start of the appeal in January or February. "It is a hearing to tie up loose ends before trial," said Paul Geoghan, a spokesman for the court. Megrahi, who has insisted throughout the trial he had nothing to do with the attack, logdged his appeal in February and a Scottish high court accepted the appeal in August. The grounds on which Megrahi is appealing are not known and will not be dealt with at Monday's hearing, according to legal experts at the university of Glasgow school of law.

Defence lawyer Alistair Duff told AFP his client would be present at the preliminary hearing but also said it would be purely procedural. "The judges may ask for written submissions because they may want to know which piece of evidence we intend to direct to in our arguments," he said. In Scottish court, submissions are usually done orally. The appeals chamber will consist of five judges. Although Duff would not comment on the grounds of the appeal, it is believed the defence will challenge evidence which came from Tony Gauci, a shopkeeper in Malta, who identified Megrahi as a man who bought clothes from his store shortly before the bombing. The reliability of Gauci's evidence was called into question during the trial.

The defence is also expected to question wether the trial judges were entitled to decide that Megrahi was the man who bought the clothes. In September, Britain's Daily Mirror reported that the bomb that blew up the Boeing 747 could have been put on board in London. If confirmed, the report would destroy a key plank in the conviction of Megrahi. The prosecution case hinges on the suitcase containing the bomb having been loaded in Frankfurt, Germany after being sent there via an Air Malta flight from Valetta by Megrahi. When Megrahi was convicted [and sentenced to] to life imprisonment in January, the verdict did not lay to rest the many unanswered questions of the families of the Lockerbie victims. The court accepted the prosecution's theory that Libya was behind the bombing, rejecting another scenario put forward that Iran, Syria and the Palestinian group FPLP-CG carried out the attack to avenge an Iranian aircraft accidentally shot down by an American missile in July 1988.

The families of the victims of the bombing have called repeatedly for a full public inquiry by the British government into the case. "What we are after is the whole truth," Jim Swire, a British doctor whose 23-year-old daughter Flora was killed in the tragedy, told GMTV television in August. Relatives of the victims of the Lockerbie bombing are travelling to Holland for the first stage of the appeal of the Libyan convicted of the atrocity. Two British fathers who lost their daughters in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 were today making the journey to Holland to be at the appeal hearing. Dr Jim Swire and the Rev John Mosey were at Camp Zeist for virtually every day of 49-year-old Al Megrahi's trial which began last May and ended in January this year.

Mr Mosey, who lost his 19-year-old daughter Helga in the bombing, said: "We feel it's important that someone from the families is there to see that justice is done." Dr Swire, whose daughter Flora, 23, was killed, said: "We followed the whole of the trial so it makes sense to follow this stage as well." Dr Swire also revealed how he and other members of the UK Families Flight 103 pressed Foreign Secretary Jack Straw for a full inquiry into the tragedy at a recent meeting. He said: "We intimated that in our view it's extremely urgent to have an inquiry because Lockerbie was always an avoidable tragedy."

The hearing tomorrow before five Scottish judges - Lords Cullen, Kirkwood, MacFadyen, Nimmo-Smith and McEwan - will consider various procedural and administrative matters. The hearing is expected to last a day and to set the date for the start of the appeal which is likely to be early next year. The full grounds of Al Megrahi's appeal have not yet been made public.

[The appeal was heard early the following year and dismissed on 14 March 2002. An account of the reasons for the failure of the appeal (primarily the astonishing failure by Megrahi’s legal team to argue the correct grounds) can be read here.]

Former FBI and CIA officers at odds over Lockerbie/Pan Am 103 bombing

[This is the headline over a report published today on the website of the news agency Aurora News. It reads as follows:]

An FBI agent who led the US investigation into the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988 has denied claims made by a former CIA officer who told Aurora News that FBI investigators did not read vital US intelligence material related to the attack.

Robert Baer, a retired CIA Officer who was based in the Middle East, had said, “I’ve been having exchanges with the FBI Investigators and they came right out and said they didn’t read the intelligence.

“I just find that extraordinary and then later for them to comment on the intelligence and say it’s no good; it’s amazing,” Baer said.

CIA OFFICER’S COMMENTS DISMISSED

But Richard Marquise, who led the FBI investigation into the attack, dismissed Baer’s claim.

“Mr Baer had no role in the investigation and anything he knows or claims to know is either hearsay or speculation,” Marquise told Aurora News.

“I find [Baer’s claims] interesting because he has previously said that the CIA did not pass us all the information, something I doubt he would be in a position to know,” Marquise added. “I agree that there were a handful of FBI personnel (agents and analysts) who had access to all the intelligence that was passed and it may have been possible that some FBI agents who played a minor role in the case may not have seen it.”

QUESTIONS REMAIN OVER SAFETY OF MEGRAHI CONVICTION

For years controversy has surrounded the case following the conviction of Libyan Abdelbaset al Megrahi in January 2001. Campaigners, including some relatives of victims of Pan Am 103, believe Megrahi was wrongly convicted and are continuing to call for a public inquiry into the events leading to the bombing.

Baer has previously claimed US intelligence pointed to Iran – not Libya – as the source of the attack and was carried it out in retaliation for the shooting down, five months previously, of Iran Air Flight 655 by the American warship the USS Vincennes. Baer told said that a convincing case implicating Libya was still to be made.

“Richard Marquise has taken a moral position on the case,” Baer said. “I can still be convinced the Libyans did it, but I still need to be convinced of that.”

Robert Black, Professor Emeritus of Scots Law at the University of Edinburgh, has spent more than two decades studying the case.

“I’d be absolutely amazed if the FBI didn’t consider the intelligence material, if only to reject it as unreliable or unusable as evidence in judicial proceedings,” Black said.

“Indeed, there’s clear evidence that they did make use of it. A key prosecution witness, Majid Giaka, was a CIA asset and was in a Department of Justice witness protection programme,” Black added. “

“The FBI falls under the Department of Justice. And Giaka was a crucial witness in the Washington DC grand jury hearing that led to the US indictment against Megrahi and Fhimah,” Black said.

Confidence that Megrahi appeal would succeed

[Around this time seven years ago, preliminary steps were being taken in court in relation to the appeal that the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission had ruled should be allowed in the Megrahi case. What follows is the text of an article published in The Jerusalem Post on 10 October 2007 and referred to on this blog:]

The conviction of Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in December 1988 - the deadliest terrorist attack ever mounted in the UK - will be overturned in an appeals process that begins with a procedural hearing on Thursday and gets under way in earnest next year, several leading experts closely connected to the case have told The Jerusalem Post.

Megrahi, who was jailed for murder in 2001, is the only man ever convicted for the Lockerbie bombing, in which 259 passengers and crew, and 11 people on the ground, lost their lives. A second Libyan defendant, Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, was acquitted.

Libya, which was held responsible for the attack, has paid compensation to victims' families, but never formally accepted responsibility. Megrahi, who has always denied involvement, lost an appeal against his conviction in 2002, and was only given leave to mount a second appeal in June.

A Scottish legal review commission found six potential grounds for a miscarriage of justice, including flaws in the process by which he was identified and, reportedly, the non-disclosure of a classified report on the timer purportedly used in the bomb. The commission referred the case back to the Scottish courts.

The overturning of Megrahi's conviction could revive the bombing investigators' original theory, widely believed by many of those close to the case, that Lockerbie was not a Libyan plot at all, but was, rather, carried out by Ahmed Jibril's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, on behalf of Iran. Among the leading figures who publicly voiced this assertion was then trade minister Ariel Sharon, who told a press conference in Madrid seven weeks after the bombing, "Israel believes it was Ahmed Jibril."

Investigators initially stated that the Pan Am jumbo jet, which was blown up 38 minutes into its journey from London to New York, was destroyed by a device featuring an air pressure switch similar to several devices seized by German police when they arrested a PFLP-GC cell a few weeks before the bombing. But the subsequent purported linking of Megrahi to items in the suitcase containing the bomb, and the discovery at the crash site of a fragment of a different timing device, purportedly traced to Libya, saw the investigation change course dramatically.

The identification of Megrahi - by a Maltese shopkeeper named Tony Gauci, who testified to having sold Megrahi items found in the suitcase - and the provenance of the "Libyan" timer have been consistently disputed by the defense.

In separate telephone interviews in the last few days, the spokesman for the Lockerbie victims' families, the UN's observer on the case and the Scottish law professor who formulated the legal framework under which Megrahi was tried have all told the Post they are convinced the conviction will be overturned.

The appeals process begins on Thursday with a procedural hearing, at which a timetable will likely be set for the full appeal next year. Megrahi is not expected to attend Thursday's hearing.

Families' spokesman Dr. Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was killed in the bombing, said he was certain that the new evidence would see Megrahi released, but that he feared it would be "convenient" for the appeals court to free the Libyan on "some semi-technical" count - "something along the lines of the prosecution having failed to give the defense access to all the evidence" - without the full truth ever coming out. Swire said he feared this full truth included "the deliberate fabrication of evidence" such as the timer fragment, in order to frame Megrahi and render Libya as the "perfect scapegoat" for Lockerbie.

Hans Koechler, appointed as an "international observer" to the trial by the UN Security Council on the nomination of then secretary-general Kofi Annan, told the Post: "They'll cancel the judgement. The appeal court will decide that a miscarriage of justice has occurred, because of the unreliability of Tony Gauci's evidence."

And Robert Black, the emeritus professor of law at the University of Edinburgh who formulated the complex legal mechanism that facilitated the original trial before Scottish judges in the Netherlands, said the same thing. "Megrahi will go free. He should never have been convicted. The evidence does not show him to have had anything to do with [the Lockerbie bombing]."

Libya's motivation in ordering the attack is said to have included a desire for revenge on the part of Col. Gaddafi for a series of confrontations with the US, including a military strike in 1986 in which his daughter was killed.

Koechler did not posit an alternative theory, but Swire and Black both said they were convinced that the PFLP-GC was to blame, and that it carried out the attack on behalf of Iran. "The Iranians had told the world that they would seek revenge for the Vincennes attack," said Swire, a reference to the shooting down by the US Navy's guided missile cruiser USS Vincennes of an Iran Air civilian flight in July 1988, in which 290 passengers and crew were killed. Iran said the attack was deliberate; the US said it had mistaken the plane for a fighter jet.

The Iranians "had colluded in the past with the PFLP-GC under Jibril, and now they colluded again," said Swire, adding: "The PFLP-GC was the 'sensible choice' because, as has been established, it maintained a workshop on the outskirts of Damascus that manufactured timing devices" involving an air-pressure switch for bombs to detonate aboard airplanes.

Both Swire and Black said the case had been skewed because of the timing of the Lockerbie investigation, which played out as the first Gulf War was developing. The US-led coalition, gearing up to take on Saddam Hussein, needed Syria to stay out of the conflict, said Swire, and also did not want to face "hordes of Iranian foot soldiers swarming across the border to attack it. So it was not worth irritating Iran and Syria."

Added Black: "The PFLP-GC was funded and protected by Syria... And with the unfolding of Operation Desert Storm... the coalition needed at least the benevolent neutrality of Syria."

Black added: "It was never anticipated that Libya would surrender the two suspects for trial. The thinking was, 'We'll just generally blame the Libyans.'"

Black said he was scandalized by the cover-up. It was terrible that "national governments would get up to this kind of thing," he said. But as a "parochial Scottish lawyer," he went on, he was most pained "that the criminal justice system in my country lent itself to this."

Koechler is calling for a new investigation into the bombing, without the involvement of the US, UK or Libya, but he said he feared "it will not happen."

MacAskill damaging record at Justice and Policing but right on Megrahi

[This is the headline over an article published today on the For Argyll website.  It reads in part:]

Beleaguered Justice Secretary, Kenny MacAskill, has made an almighty mess of too much at the Justice department to survive – although the concentrated attack on his performance has not come when it should – at the point where he persisted against all reason and evidence in trying to remove from Scots law the requirement for prosecution to present corroboratory evidence. (...)

Some dimwit MSPs even did what they were told and voted for this proposal in the Scottish parliament, while simultaneously throwing up their hands in public at the irresponsible horror of if. It was only the outrage of the public that gave pause to the rampant Justice Secretary, anxious to do his bit for the independence vote in attracting women voters who were said to favour the move. The matter is not necessarily concluded either, simply postponed until people stop watching. (...)

It is unfair though, that Mr MacAskill, is vilified for releasing the dubiously convicted and cancer striken Lockerbie bomber, Ali Al Megrahi, to return to die with his family in Libya.

Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora died in the bombing of the Pan Am plane and has been a doughty campaigner for those guilty to be brought to justice. He came to find Megrahi an innocent man and finally regarded him as a friend.

What MacAskill had to confront was the fact of Megrahi’s conviction.

He chose to act on the basis of growing uncertainty on the rightness of that conviction and on the grounds of common humanity. Whatever political chicanery was behind all of this and whatever its origin, we may never know – but the right decision was made and this is one for which the Justice Secretary ought not to be hounded.

Justice Secretary survives no confidence motion

[The Cabinet Secretary for Justice, Kenny MacAskill MSP, yesterday survived a motion of no confidence after a debate in the Scottish Parliament. A report in today’s edition of The Herald contains the following:]

MSPs rejected a call for him to resign by 62 votes to 54, with a single abstention. (...)

MSPs voted on a motion tabled by Graeme Pearson, Scottish Labour's justice spokesman, which accused Mr MacAskill of a "failure to provide effective governance of Police Scotland". (...)

Speaking after the vote, Mr Pearson, a former senior police officer, said: "I'm disappointed the SNP have decided to fall in line and failed to put the integrity of the justice system before party politics.” (...)

He added: "While Nicola Sturgeon backed Kenny MacAskill during the vote, it is widely expected she will sack him in a matter of weeks. She is only delaying the inevitable."

Labour, Conservative, LibDem and Green MSPs supported the call for Mr MacAskill to quit. (...)

In a debate before the vote, Mr Pearson said Mr MacAskill had "abandoned his responsibilities in relation to police reform".

He said: "He's tired, lacking ideas and gracelessly refuses to listen, leaving it to a private power struggle between officials to deliver."

He added: "His incompetent handling of the Megrahi affair, corroboration, stop and search, office and control-room closures have all been characterised by his view that everything is now someone else's responsibility.

"His absence in the armed police debate was, in my view, the final straw."

[While there are many valid criticisms of Kenny MacAskill’s tenure of the Justice portfolio, his release of Abdelbaset Megrahi is not one of them, though the manner in which he tackled the issue -- particularly his insistence that the prisoner transfer and compassionate release applications should be dealt with together -- may well be open to criticism.]

Dad tells of Lockerbie bombings aftermath

[This is the headline over a report published yesterday on the website of Leicestershire newspaper The Hinckley Times. It reads as follows:]

Rev Malcolm Clarke hosted two evenings in conversation with John Mosey, father of Pan Am Flight 103 victim Helga Mosey, at Hinckley’s United Reformed Church in The Borough

Talking in public with the father of one of the Lockerbie bombing victims was one of the most moving things minister Malcolm Clarke has ever done, the clergyman has admitted.

Mr Clarke hosted two evenings in conversation with John Mosey, father of Pan Am Flight 103 victim Helga Mosey, at Hinckley’s United Reformed Church in The Borough.

Around 130 people went along to hear Mr Mosey talk about December 21 1988, the day his life changed forever, and how, as a Christian, he has coped since with the aftermath of the murder of his 19-year-old daughter.

Mr Clarke said: “This event was one of the most moving I can ever remember.

“He told us that he and his family felt able immediately to forgive the bombers but that he has found it more difficult to forgive the western nations who clearly knew something beforehand but chose to say nothing.

“Nevertheless he spoke about the embodiment of the Christian ethic to ‘forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us’.

“And he told us more about the international politics of the event, whereby he holds neither Libya nor the convicted Abdelbaset al-Megrahi responsible but rather feels that more unpalatable facts have been suppressed for 25 years, and he hopes that one day the truth will out.”

Mr Mosey together with Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter was also killed on board the flight, and others are campaigning for the conviction of the so-called Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi to be overturned.

Megrahi, who was the only person convicted in connection with the incident, died in 2012 after beingreleased from jail on compassionate grounds because he was suffering from cancer.

Mr Mosey said he would be glad to return to Hinckley to talk again about the situation if the Scottish courts uphold the appeal. 

[Further blogposts referring to the Rev’d John Mosey can be found here.]

This dreadful case demolished confidence in justice system

On this date in 2010, three items were published on this blog that perhaps merit a second glance. The first item is headed Lord Advocate condemned as ‘disastrous’. Here are a few sentences:

The appointment of Elish Angiolini as Scotland’s Lord Advocate was “a disastrous experiment which should never be repeated”, according to one of the country’s leading QCs.

Robert Black, Professor Emeritus of Law at the University of Edinburgh, condemned Ms Angiolini — who announced her resignation last week — as “a Crown Office staffer” (...)

The criticism from such a senior legal figure is the first open expression of a wider discontent within some sections of the legal establishment, which has simmered since the appointment four years ago of Ms Angiolini, the former Solicitor General and a former head of policy at the Crown Office.

“She had never in her working life spent a day outside the Crown Office, when the whole point of a Lord Advocate is that he or she is not a Crown Office creature,” Professor Black said.

“That’s why she was the wrong appointment: not because she was a solicitor, not because she was a woman — she would have been [an] ideal Crown Agent [the civil service head of the Crown Office], but she was entirely the wrong person be Lord Advocate.”

He added: “It is to be hoped that it will be recognised that the appointment of a Crown Office staffer as Lord Advocate was a disastrous experiment which should never be repeated.”

The second item is headed The Lockerbie Trial - Dr Jim Swire questions the guilty verdict and reproduced in part an article written for Newsnet Scotland. Here are a few sentences:

I remain at a loss as to why their Lordships failed to see the weaknesses of the prosecution’s case. As usual it is easy to criticise them in retrospect, but this seems to me an unfair and unproductive exercise. Let us just mark their CVs with the phrase ‘could have done better’.

I believe we cannot leave it there: to do so would be grossly unfair to Mr Megrahi and his family, and an intolerable burden on the memory of those who died. Mr Megrahi himself now seems to wrestle with guilt feelings over having withdrawn his appeal.

Beyond that however I also believe that the outcome has severely damaged the previous good reputation of our judicial system in Scotland. That I think should concern us all, for our citizens need to be able to believe that their judicial system will act independently of political or any other improper external pressure. Indeed justice should be, and be seen to be a faithful bulwark for the citizen even against his own government should he feel unfairly treated by it.

I believe the fall-out from this dreadful case has demolished many thinking Scottish people’s confidence in the objectivity of their justice system, and that only an independent review of this case and the evidence for and against the verdict can restore that.

The third item is headed Doyen of Nationalist lawyers speaks out and reproduced a statement by Ian Hamilton QC:

"I don't think there's a lawyer in Scotland who now believes Mr Megrahi was justly convicted. The Americans were out for vengeance. Anyone with a darker skin would do. With their barrowloads of money to buy witnesses, aided by our police and prosecution, they hoodwinked our courts."

In memoriam Jock Thomson QC

It is just over one year since staunch Justice for Megrahi supporter Jock Thomson QC died. Two years ago on this date a letter from Jock headlined Career prosecutors as law officers have destroyed criminal justice system was published. What follows is the blogpost reproducing that letter:

[This is the headline over a letter in today’s edition of The Herald from Jock Thomson QC. It reads as follows:]

I see from the Scottish Legal News that Lady Stacey is to preside over a high-powered debate on the abolition of corroboration organised by the Scottish Association for the Study of Offending.

The outcome will be academic since Lord Carloway already has the green light – as ever, the devil will be in the detail.

History will show that the genesis of the destruction of our criminal justice system was the appointment of career prosecutors as law officers: beginning with (now) Dame Elish Angiolini QC as Solicitor General and continuing with a succession of senior members of Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) since who have become and will remain Lord Advocate and Solicitor General for the foreseeable future.

This has led to the unholy, unhealthy alliance of law officers and law makers: Kenny MacAskill and Frank Mulholland, in the same bed. There is no separation of powers. Constitutionally the system now is morally and mortally flawed.

The fall-out from Cadder led to the knee-jerk Cadder Reforms. Ms Angiolini's furore about lack of convictions in rape cases, many of which should never have been raised in the first place, led Mr MacAskill to appoint Lord Carloway to consider whether the law should be amended to abolish the need for corroboration. The current Lord Advocate wants to do away with the accused's right to silence and the logical follow-on from that will be to make the accused a compellable witness. Will the next inexorable draconian step be the replacement of the presumption of innocence with that of a presumption of guilt? It's beginning to look that way. And by that time there may be little or no Criminal Legal Aid.

[Here is something I wrote on this blog on 19 May 2011, when the present Lord Advocate’s appointment was announced:]

This appointment is not unexpected, but it is to be regretted. Virtually the whole of Frank Mulholland's career has been spent as a Crown Office civil servant. This is not, in my view, the right background for the incumbent of the office of Lord Advocate, one of whose functions has traditionally been to bring an outsider's perspective to the operations and policy-making of the department. Sir Humphrey Appleby was an outstanding civil servant of a particular kind, but his role was an entirely different one from that of Jim Hacker and no-one would have regarded it as appropriate that he should be translated from Permanent Secretary of the Department of Administrative Affairs to Minister (or, indeed, from Secretary of the Cabinet to Prime Minister).

The appointment by the previous Labour administration in Scotland of Elish Angiolini as Solicitor General and then as Lord Advocate was a mistake, both constitutionally and practically, as was her retention as Lord Advocate by the SNP minority government (though the political reasons for her re-appointment were understandable). It is sad that the new majority SNP Government has not taken the opportunity to return to the wholly desirable convention of appointing an advocate or solicitor from private practice to fill the office of Lord Advocate. The much-needed casting of a beady eye over the operations of the Crown Office is not to be expected from this appointee. This is deeply regrettable since such scrutiny is long overdue.

The United States Empire

[What follows is excerpted from a long article by Washington DC attorney Bruce Fein headlined The United States Empire which was published yesterday on the website of The Washington Times:]

If the United States is not an empire, the word has lost all meaning.

No sparrow falls in the forest that does not provoke a national security assessment and response.

At present, we are employing military force in six countries — Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.

In 2011, we reduced Libya to rubble after Muammar Gaddafi did our bidding in abandoning weapons of mass destruction and in paying more than $1 billion to compensate for the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland. (...)

We dot the planet with hundreds of military bases.

We police the oceans with aircraft carriers, submarines and battleships.

We dominate the skies with spy satellites, stealth aircraft, and hundreds of fighters and bombers.

We have outstanding economic sanctions against 20 nations for bad behavior.

We control cyberspace with the ubiquitous collection, retention, and search of electronic communications of friend and foe alike.

We expend $1 trillion annually on national security, a sum more than the collective defense expenditures of the rest of the world.

We honor secrecy more than transparency, a quest for a risk-free existence more than liberty.

We bedeck the presidency with the trappings of a Roman emperor, including a bloated Pretorian Guard and a White House staff approaching 500. Roads are closed and traffic stops whenever the president travels. (...)

In sum, the United States has become a full-fledged empire.

Acknowledging this truth is the first step to curing the disease. Otherwise, self-ruination will be our fate. As Abraham Lincoln presciently lectured: “At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

More than a miscarriage of justice - a judicial scandal

[I have only today become aware of a long article on the Swiss INFOsperber website which was published in March 2011. It gives the views of, and includes a verbatim interview with, the distinguished Swiss lawyer Dr Dieter Neupert on the Lockerbie trial and is headlined Der Justiz-Skandal nach dem Lockerbie-Drama (The Judicial Scandal after the Lockerbie Drama). The article is in German, but Google Translate does a reasonably good job of providing an English-language version. Here is one paragraph, translated by me:]

On 31 January 2001 the surprising verdict was delivered: Fhimah was acquitted, while Al Megrahi was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. This was "a miscarriage of justice," says the prominent Scottish jurist Robert Black, in chorus with other legal scholars. The internationally renowned Swiss law professor Stefan Trechsel sees in the Lockerbie case "more than just a miscarriage of justice." It was a "judicial scandal as a result of an opaque intrigue, a real swamp," says Trechsel. (Am 31 Januar 2001 erfolgte das überraschende Urteil: Fhimah wurde freigesprochen, Al Megrahi hingegen für schuldig befunden – und zu lebenslanger Haft verurteilt. Dies sei «ein Fehlurteil», sagt der prominente schottische Jurist Robert Black, im Chor mit anderen Rechtsgelehrten. Der international bekannte Schweizer Rechtsprofessor Stefan Trechsel sieht im Fall Lockerbie «mehr als nur einen Justizirrtum». Es sei ein «Justiz-Skandal als Folge einer undurchsichtigen Intrige, ein richtiger Sumpf», sagt Trechsel.)