Change the law: protect crime victims

In an allegation of assault or aggravated burglary the witnesses and victims do not currently have automatic anonymity and therefore put themselves at extreme risk of retribution from the family and friends of the perpetrators of the crime who may decide to take the law into their own hands.

The law as it stands provides no real incentive for people to do their civic duty.

Giving evidence from a remote location would avoid innocent witnesses and victims having to endure the fear and real danger posed by visiting a courtroom where the perpetrators of the crime and their family and friends are present - this should be an automatic right rather than a privilege.

The principle of open justice can act as a bar to successful prosecutions because of the natural fear a witness may have in the case of a gun or knife or other violent crime so if the default position in these cases was changed to one where the Police and or CPS should have to apply for open proceedings rather than the existing system where the onus is upon the witness to declare their fear then potentially more people would be willing to testify.

Safety aside, the impact on the long term wellbeing of victims of violent crimes and their families in crimes of this type may not be fully understood and certainly may be underestimated. The CPS guidance on this matter talks of the police establishing whether a witness is in fear, yet this may only become apparent once the proceedings are in train and may be exacerbated by the behaviour of the defendants and their families and contacts during the proceedings. In instances like this, it is too late to offer protection – the names of the witnesses have already been disclosed; the witnesses may well have been seen by defendants, their families and associates, because of the poor design of many Courts. The ECHR should serve everyone; the current system seems to favour the protection of one group at the expense of the other.
Victims of violent crime have already suffered at the hands of their perpetrators. The purpose of a court of law is to establish whether a crime has been committed and whether those accused were indeed the perpetrators and we, rightly in my view, have a presumption of innocence until guilt is proved but I am not sure how an innocent man or woman would be disadvantaged if they didn’t know the names of the witnesses but relied upon their counsel to interrogate a witness via , for example, a live link to a remote location with the witnesses behind a screen thus serving the purposes of justice and the protection of the innocent.