Category: Civil liberties

Government, the police and intelligence services are too easily given sweeping powers that they too often abuse

Jenny works with campaigners to defend our civil liberties

Read on for her latest posts on this topic

Public Office Bill Committee Stage Day 1

Published on by jonesjb

My speech to my amendments on the first day of committee stage: I have six amendments in this group and will speak first on five of them—Amendments 64, 65, 67, 69 and 140. The purpose of these is to clarify which functions of higher education providers fall within the scope of Schedule 2, so that there is greater certainty about where the duty of candour and accountability apply.

The Government have acknowledged that universities perform public functions, including teaching and awarding degrees, but their position leaves important questions about the boundaries of those functions to be resolved on a case-by-case basis. What about activities such as student welfare and pastoral support, safeguarding, accommodation, complaints and appeals, or the way that universities respond to serious incidents? These are a big part of what universities do, and the decisions they make can have a huge and lasting impact on students’ lives.

These amendments spell out exactly which of universities’ activities I am talking about; they cover admissions and assessment, academic progression and disciplinary processes, student support and welfare, safeguarding, accommodation, complaints and appeals, and responses to serious incidents, including student deaths and subsequent investigations. These amendments seek to give us a clearer picture of which university activities should count as public functions and would help ensure that the right standards of openness and accountability apply.

The importance of this question becomes painfully clear when we hear from families who have lost a child while they were at university. A parent who contacted me through ForThe100 told me that their son died by suicide in April 2022, just four hours after the university had informed him that a restriction it had already imposed upon him had been escalated to a complete ban from campus. The family had not known that he was facing disciplinary action. After his death, the parent described to me a long and difficult process of seeking answers, including the struggle to obtain information and get the university to answer their questions properly. Even after the inquest, their attempts to obtain a full response to their concerns continued for a further 18 months. Families should not have to spend years seeking information, answers and accountability while they are already dealing with an unimaginable loss.

The National Review of Higher Education Student Suicide Deaths, published in 2025, recorded concerns from families about transparency, communication and their involvement in investigations. It recommended a duty of candour tailored to higher education, and those concerns underline why we need to be clear about the responsibilities that apply when universities make decisions around students’ welfare and respond to serious incidents.

A government letter of 1 September recognises that some university activities are public functions, but it leaves just too many questions about the other important areas. It does not make clear how the ethical conduct requirements in Chapter 2 are intended to apply to universities. These amendments would help to clear that up. They would give universities, students and their families a clearer understanding of where these responsibilities lie, while still allowing individual circumstances to be considered.

If there are concerns that extending these provisions to higher education would mean that universities become responsible for providing healthcare or guaranteeing every student’s safety, I can reassure your Lordships that this is not what these amendments are about. There is an important difference between a duty to take reasonable steps to prevent harm and a duty to be open and honest about what happened if something goes wrong. The Bill’s duty of candour and assistance is about openness and co-operation in the inquiries and the investigations it covers; it means being prepared to explain what an institution knew, what it did and why.

I will put four specific questions to the Minister, reflecting concerns raised by families through ForThe100 on the Government’s intended treatment of higher education. Do the Government consider pastoral support, student welfare, safeguarding and university-arranged accommodation to be activities forming part of the provision of higher education? Does that extend to academic disciplinary processes, student complaints and appeals, and responses to serious incidents including student deaths? If these are public functions, is there a reason that they should not be expressly identified in Schedule 2, rather than leaving the boundaries to case-by-case judicial interpretation? How do the Government aim to ensure that Chapter 2, on ethical requirements, applies to the relevant public functions of higher education providers? I would really like the Government to explain how the Bill will operate where a university’s activities involve both public functions and arrangements with private contractors.

My Amendment 66A moves on to all of your Lordships, because I do not understand why politicians like us should be held to a lower standard of honesty than other public officials. That is what this amendment is about. Why are Members of this House and other UK Parliaments and Assemblies excluded from this new offence of misleading the public? Is it clear enough when the offence applies? The Government have decided that intentionally or recklessly deceiving the public on matters of serious public concern should be a criminal offence for public officials. We are talking about serious deception proved to the criminal standard in court, not making a mistake, getting something wrong or changing your mind. The offence will apply to Ministers, civil servants, police officers, members of the Armed Forces and other public officials, but Members of this House, the House of Commons, the Scottish Parliament, Senedd Cymru and the Northern Ireland Assembly are excluded. I simply do not understand why that distinction has been drawn. If the purpose is to improve accountability in public life, should that principle not also extend to this House—to people who actually make laws, scrutinise the Government and speak to the public on matters of national importance?

There is a second issue that this amendment is for: uncertainty about when someone is acting in their official capacity. The Bill makes the offence dependent on a person acting in their capacity as a public official or public authority, but it does not clearly define what that means. People should be able to understand the law before they act. It has been raised that the Law Commission previously warned, in its examination of misconduct in public office, that the meaning of actingin an official capacity was insufficiently clear. The Bill abolishes the common law offence of misconduct in public office because of the uncertainty around it, yet the new offence of misleading the public relies on almost the same language. Should we not be careful not to repeat the very problem that the Bill is meant to address? I was going to talk about the case against Boris Johnson, but I will skip that.

When creating a new criminal offence, should Parliament not seek to provide as much clarity as possible, rather than leave key questions about its scope to be settled by the courts? This amendment would bring Members of this House, the House of Commons, the Scottish Parliament, Senedd Cymru and the Northern Ireland Assembly all into the definition of public official for the purposes of duty of candour and the offence of misleading the public. It would apply the principle of accountability to those who make our laws as well as those who implement them.

Secondly, it would protect parliamentary proceedings and political opinion. Nothing said or done in the proceedings of any UK Parliament or legislature could be caught by these offences. The amendment would also expressly protect expressions of honestly held political belief or opinion by Members of those Parliaments and Assemblies, so it is not about restricting debate in Parliament or criminalising political differences; it is about holding politicians to account for serious deception.

Thirdly, it would clarify when certain officeholders are acting in their official capacity and would provide that Members of this House and other UK Parliaments and Assemblies, Ministers and specified mayors are treated as acting in their official role when speaking to the public about matters of serious public concern, while they are still free to express their political views. Communications made in a judicial capacity or concerning solely private life, family life or private business are obviously excluded.

Fourthly, it would clarify what constitutes harm for the purposes of the offence. It would provide that harm can include undermining public confidence in public authorities, public officials, the exercise of public functions or democratic processes. Then it identifies six purposes for which such a communication might be made. It covers situations where deception could have serious consequences, such as misleading the public to justify military action, concealing risks to public safety or misrepresenting how public money is spent.

This is Bill needs clarification. I have a lot of sympathy for almost all the amendments that we have heard today. I urge the Minister and the Government to actually listen and act on what they are hearing. There are difficult questions where criminal law and political speech intersect, but difficulty is not a reason to look away; it is a reason for us to engage, examine the wording carefully and get it right. I support Amendment 66 from Lady Coffey, as well.

Hansard record here: Public Office (Accountability) Bill – Hansard – UK Parliament

Government Political Priorities and Legislative Agenda

Published on by jonesjb

I congratulate Lord Hunt, on bringing this debate. I also want to apologise to him, because I am always surprised by how passionately he talks about climate change. That is on me. Sorry about that. It is wonderful to listen to.

I have met the new Prime Minister a few times and I have a lovely photograph on my phone of him and me at Glastonbury last year. I sort of thought we could work together, but the more I see what is happening and going through, the more I am beginning to think it will not be possible. It seems as if the slow-moving, stagnant mechanism of government has got its claws into him and he is not thinking very creatively any more. I hope I am wrong. We shall see over the next few weeks and months.

I want to mention three things that are crucial for the future of this Labour Government, which will all help society as well as the environment. We have to accept that climate chaos is the new normal. Thousands of people died this summer in the heat and that is going to keep happening if we are not very careful about adapting to it. People arriving at A&E with heat exhaustion and so on is also going to be the new normal. This Government must not make it worse by going ahead with the Jackdaw gas field and Rosebank oil field. That is folly. What they should be doing is what they have just scrapped—putting solar panels on every supermarket car park and every roof, everywhere they possibly can. That is the sort of thing they ought to be doing to be creative about combating climate change. We need to adapt to hot summers. A tiny measure would be to put shutters on all the windows, as in France. I have lots of ideas and I am quite happy to chat them through.

The second thing is to help save the NHS, not by privatising it but by remembering that prevention is better than cure. If you cut pollution, you cut the number of people going into hospital. You cut the number of children whose lungs are so stunted by pollution that they have lifelong problems with their breathing. Well done to Sadiq Khan here in London, where he has massively cut air pollution. We should have low emission zones across the whole country, as they do in mainland Europe.

Thirdly, one big way to reduce pollution would be to take the water companies into public ownership. The Prime Minister mentioned those words yesterday. I would like to think he means renationalisation, but I do not know any more, because he keeps changing his mind. I have stopped paying the sewage part of my bill. I asked Thames Water how much that part was. I was happy to pay for the water, obviously, but I was not prepared to pay for the sewage it was dumping in the Thames. It told me that it did not work out the bill like that, so at the moment I am not paying my bill. We will see if it takes me to court before it goes bankrupt. We stopped the poll tax with a campaign of non-payment. Civil disobedience is possibly the only way to fight companies such as the water companies which are operating in a way that is a disbenefit to the whole of society. I say to the Government that the Green Party always has loads of very practical ideas and I am very happy to share them.

Hansard record here: Government Political Priorities and Legislative Agenda – Hansard – UK Parliament

Public Office (Accountability) Bill Second Reading

Published on by jonesjb

I support the Bill and hope that the Government will listen to some of the amendments that will be tabled, because it can be improved. It seems that noble Lords from all around the House agree that it is a stain on the country when families who have suffered so much should then have to fight the state for the truth and for understanding that it did wrong.

Public institutions should tell the truth, even, or particularly, when the truth is uncomfortable. Hillsborough should have changed this culture, but again and again what we are seeing is the same instinct—the same culture—to protect the institution rather than the people it has failed. All tribute to the Hillsborough Law Now campaign for the fact that it pushed so hard and made us listen. In fact, many of us have been calling this the “Hillsborough Bill” from the start.

Of course, this goes much wider than Hillsborough. We have heard of the incredible losses that people experienced, but there is the Post Office scandal, the infected blood scandal, the Grenfell scandal and the Manchester Arena scandal—scandal after scandal where institutions cared more about protecting their reputation than they did about helping the people who have been impacted.

The Bill will be an important step in changing that culture, but only if it is tough and only if we understand that you do not change a culture just with words. A lot of processes have to really work inside it. For example, making something a criminal offence will not change that culture on its own. I welcome Clause 10 and its duty on public authorities to promote and maintain ethical conduct, but that needs to mean more than just another policy document. It needs leadership and proper monitoring, alongside practical codes of practice. The question should not simply be, “Has the law been complied with?” It should be, “Has the culture changed?”

The Bill rightly creates consequences when a public authority fails to meet its duty of candour, including the possibility of financial penalties. But if a public authority is fined, it is the taxpayer who pays. How on earth is that a deterrent? We really have to rethink these things.

We need to be clear about who is accountable when there is serious institutional failure. I am not suggesting that every institutional failure is the personal responsibility of a chief executive, but where those at the top are responsible, there needs to be a clear line of accountability. Obviously, this would apply to water companies as much as any other sort of organisation. Codes of practice mean that people can speak and can be judged on what they say.

I emphasise the role of whistleblowing. I have had an experience with a whistleblower myself, and if I have time at the end I might talk about my little brush with a public institution that lied to me and distorted things. It shows that almost every public institution will hide its wrongdoing if it possibly can.

Of course, all this raises the wider question: what about politicians? How are we going to pass a law that does not include ourselves? Why is it that everybody else has to tell the truth but not elected politicians and Peers? That is very wrong. It is wrong to pass a Bill that does not include us. I am not questioning parliamentary privilege—I accept that we can protect political debate—but we have to draw a line around deliberate deception. If we are prepared to demand candour from public servants, surely we should be prepared to ask it of ourselves.

Do we have the legal capacity to deliver the Bill? The Government anticipate an increase in legally aided inquest cases from a few hundred to potentially over 11,000 per year. I hope this will be off-set by the fact that the duty of candour will mean swift justice as opposed to long, drawn-out cases. That would be a really positive result.

University life ought to be covered in the Bill as well. I am not sure which bits are covered and which are not. How will the duties of candour and ethical conduct work in practice in higher education? What happens after an inquiry or inquest? What is the point of establishing the truth if nobody is responsible for making sure that changes happen?

My experience of being lied to by a public institution was being lied to by the Met. Back in 2012, somebody in my team at the London Assembly suggested that I ask for my record with the police. Other people had been doing it. The police very kindly sent me a report. They had me on their domestic extremist database, which obviously, for a rabid Green like me, was useful notoriety. I really did not mind at all. There were only 17 entries on this report and every single one was something that I had boasted about, either in newsletters or on social media—speaking to a rally in Trafalgar Square, going on a bike ride with some protesters and that sort of thing. I laughed at this. I thought it was so trivial: why on earth had they spent all those years trying to compile a report on me when I was telling them what I was doing anyway?

Later, however, a whistleblower came forward and told me that in the same month after I had asked for my report, he saw three officers engaged in physically destroying a number of police records by shredding. He believed that all those records were related to me. There were in excess of 30 reports. One of those officers then began to electronically delete a number of police records from a police database. Again, the whistleblower thought those records were about me. He had an absolutely miserable time afterwards in the Met and finally left. He said that he did not become a police officer

“to monitor politicians or political parties, nor to pay casual disregard to policy and procedure”.

Whistleblowers are people who we have to protect very seriously. We have to make sure that they are not driven out of their jobs by people who do not want to be reported on.

I very much support the Bill. I hope that we can amend it and make it much better.

Hansard record here: Public Office (Accountability) Bill – Hansard – UK Parliament

Combating Atrocity Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide

Published on by jonesjb

My Lords, in the early 1990s, I worked in Tigray, northern Ethiopia, at Axum, which is more or less on the southern border with Eritrea. I was there for a few months as an archaeologist. Before I went, I did hardly any research about the area. My life at the time was travelling around the near East to different digs, and I had got a bit blasé about new countries, new currencies and new languages.

We were lodged in Axum in a very basic but secure hotel, a bit like a Roman house—three sides and well fenced with a big gate on the fourth side. On such digs, one worked with local people who also dig and while we worked, we chatted. The locals came across as subdued, very thin and did not talk much about their lives past or present. Much later, I realised, of course, that they were suffering from quite severe trauma.

The food at the hotel was very basic. After long days working at 6,000 feet—at one point, I had 12 small trenches open on a hillside, which meant quite a lot of exercise—we came back to almost always the same meal: boiled goat, pasta and tinned tomato sauce. I was vegetarian at the time but as I lost weight quite quickly, I began to eat the goat meat as well. Our hosts would go to the market, buy three little goats at a time and let them graze tethered together in the grass inside the hotel. Then, one day, there would just be two grazing and fresh, boiled goat on the menu. The lack of vegetables and fruit was not because the local people were not good at farming and growing but as a result of past burning of crops and destruction of trees and bushes—plus, of course, the denying of food from international organisations.

This was all caused by the conflict of a few previous years. For example, in 1989, there was an advance southward by the rebel forces of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, or EPRDF, a coalition led by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front—the TPLF. The rebels thrust to within 100 miles of Addis Ababa and to fight the TPLF, the authorities forcibly conscripted tens of thousands of young men and boys, some as young as 13 or 14, in violation of international law and Ethiopian regulations on military service.

A year later, in 1990, there was a major defeat with the loss of the port town, Massawa—on the Red Sea coast to the north of Eritrea—to the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front, the EPLF. Is everybody keeping up? During the fighting, 200 civilians were killed, many of them kept hostage as human shields by retreating government forces. Massawa was repeatedly bombed by government aircraft using napalm or phosphorus bombs, high explosives and cluster bombs. Main targets were places where civilian refugees were encamped outside the town.

About 25,000 tonnes of food donated by international humanitarian organisations were burned and the Government prevented a ship carrying relief supplies docking by threatening to attack it. On numerous occasions, soldiers in garrison towns near the front line arbitrarily opened fire on local residents, including women and children. Local women were forced to work as cooks, cleaners and prostitutes with the soldiers.

A year later, in 1991, there were killings of demonstrators who were protesting against the new EPRDF Government. A major humanitarian crisis developed as a result of the war, which led to a widespread famine—hence the food we were eating as archaeologists, but which was probably a lot better than what the local people were managing to eat. It also inflicted immense economic damage on the region, with the cost of rebuilding alone estimated to be tens of billions of pounds. But it was not a genocide, apparently.

Then, nearly three decades later, in 2020-22, there was an acknowledged genocide committed in Tigray. Estimates suggest 162,000 to 600,000 civilians were killed, with over 120,000 women raped and more than 6 million Tigrayans affected by violence, displacement and famine. More than 2.2 million people were displaced, and the destruction of healthcare and social infrastructure left the region in crisis, with maternal mortality rates quadrupling.

This is a deeply traumatised country. In 2024, the Australian Greens expressed deep concern over the continuing humanitarian crisis in Tigray, citing the New Lines Institute genocide report. They believe the actions of Ethiopian and Eritrean forces may constitute genocide and urge the Australian Government to support accountability. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for bringing this debate: we here must do the same, and I hope the Government listen to our debate.

I would also like to mention the Armenian genocide of 1915 to 1916. Of the around 1.5 million Armenians who lived in the Ottoman Empire in 1915, at least 664,000 and possibly as many as 1.2 million were killed in massacres or individual killings, or died from systematic ill-treatment, exposure and starvation.

As of today, the UK does not officially recognise that genocide, as it is

“not for governments to decide whether genocide has been committed as this is a complex legal question”.

However, it

“recognises the terrible suffering that was inflicted on Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire and acknowledges the strength of feeling regarding this terrible episode of history”.

Well, that is good, then, that they recognise the suffering.

Of course, there is the genocide in Gaza, which other noble Lords have mentioned. There are recommendations for the Government from ActionAid which would end our Government’s complicity and uphold their obligations under international law. They should act urgently, consistently and concretely to prevent and respond to atrocity crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

To me, as someone who does not talk about this issue a lot—although I talk about human rights a lot—it seems a rather haphazard process as to when a humanitarian disaster becomes an atrocity, a massacre or a genocide. My view is that the UK must upholdinternational law consistently, support accountability wherever violations occur, and ensure it is never complicit in the crimes it claims to oppose. It really does not look like that at the moment.

Link to the debate here: Combating Atrocity Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity and – Hansard – UK Parliament

Crime and Policing Bill Report Stage Day 6

Published on by jonesjb

As the Green Peers are not part of the usual channels, we were not able to give our views on the fact that this very important piece of legislation is being bullied through this House by the Government. It is absolutely outrageous that we do not have another day for Report. I hold both Members of the Front Bench accountable for this. It is not acceptable. This is no way to make good law, when we are going to be very tired in the later hours and possibly in the early hours. Continue reading “Crime and Policing Bill Report Stage Day 6” →