Miscarriages of justice?

In the case of the Guilford 4 and the Birmingham 6 - where so called IRA bombers were convicted in British courts - the UK police hid and manufactured evidence according to subsequent enquiries and all the defendants had to be 'officially pardoned.' In the case of Stephen Lawrence's racist murder, the investigating police were also found to be racists by a subsequent national enquiry. Now, 29 years after the event, the 96 dead victims of Hillsborough Football Stadium crush are 'exhonerated' from causing their own deaths. It turns out that police management was the major reason why these people died and that the police also had organised fraudulent evidence to blame the Liverpool football supporters.

But these, and many others, are not miscarriages of justice.

Dr Michael Naughton, senior lecturer at the University of Bristol, is the founder and director of the University of Bristol Innocence Project. He makes a distinction between miscarriages of justice and “abortions of justice”, where police actively undermine a fair trial.
'There was a real crisis of confidence in the criminal justice system when those cases were revealed to be wrongful convictions,' says Dr Naughton.

A miscarriage of justice implies that some mistake happened so that the wrong result emerged from the procedure. But with Guilford, Birmingham, Hillsborough, the case of Stephen Lawrence and the rest, 'something' did not go wrong in the procedure. Instead the procedure, including for example in the Hillsborough case, where 116 police reports and statements were deliberately altered to prevent any culpability attaching to the force, was organised beforehand to produce the desired result.

On the 27 April, Teresa May, the UK Home Secretary with responsibility for the police, made touching remarks in Parliament about the dignity and courage of the Hillsborough families in their pursuit of justice. On the 25th, in a speech ostensibly supporting remaining inside the EU, she attacked the European Convention on Human Rights as they 'can bind the hands of Parliament'. This is the Parliament that (with the odd honourable exception) stood firmly behind 'our' police force and 'our independent judiciary' in the decades when public voices, families and campaigners raised the 'abortions of justice' carried out by these bodies and were excoriated for their efforts by the mass media and inside Parliament by the leaders of the mainstream parties.

It is surely more essential than ever that as many judicial bodies that are credibly available like the ECHR and the EU based European Court, coming from outside Britain's loaded system, should have the right to scrutinise and to respond to the cases raised by those who challenge their treatment inside a country with little to recommend about its justice system (unless you are a billionaire with a property case.)