Whose Justice?

Stephen Sedley

  • The Report of the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice
    HMSO, 261 pp, £21.50, July 1993, ISBN 0 10 122632 2

It used to be said in Whitehall that the first job of a royal commission was to lay down a decent cellar. Royal commissions were grand affairs, the Rolls Royces of public deliberation, with a pedigree almost a thousand years long. Some four hundred of them were set up during the 19th century, and almost a hundred and forty in the first three-quarters of this century. But from 1977 until the release of the Birmingham Six in 1991, not one royal commission was appointed. It had become the proclaimed task of government to govern, not to appoint bodies to agonise about what should be done. In a lecture I gave in 1988 I found myself speculating that this magnificent beast might be facing extinction. It is, after all, only the noblest species of quite a large genus which includes Parliamentary select and standing committees (these having the considerable advantage that the government of the day can exercise some control over them), inquiries set up by resolution of both Houses of Parliament (rare creatures, of which the Lynskey Tribunal and the Aberfan Inquiry are examples) and inquiries under specific statutory powers (policing, childcare, medical services). In addition any public body has the inherent power to appoint anyone to inquire into anything on its behalf (prominently at the moment, the Scott Inquiry into the Matrix-Churchill affair). Even the coroner’s inquest is a form of public inquiry. Together, these inquiries form a considerable tranche of constitutional practice, more catholic and deliberative than litigation, less partisan and more judicial than political debate; and because nobody has a right to a public inquiry, they are a flexible instrument of government which can be used to alleviate rather than increase embarrassment. Accordingly, at moments of major concern they have an important constitutional role in reassuring the world that the state is examining the entrails and that all will shortly be well.

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