News

Divisional Court decision on 7/7 Inquests
30 November 2010

In R (Secretary of State for the Home Department) v Assistant Deputy Coroner for Inner West London, the Divisional Court dismissed the Home Secretary's application for judicial review and found that the Coroner does not have the power to sit in closed or secret proceedings. The Home Secretary challenged the Coroner's ruling that rule 17 of the Coroners Rules 1984 did not give her the power to hear sensitive evidence as to whether the 7/7 bombings could have been prevented by the Security Service and Police in closed proceedings. The dispute centred on the Coroner's power to exclude the public in the interests of national security and turned on the meaning of the words 'the public' in rule 17. The issue was whether the power to exclude 'the public' extended to excluding interested persons and their legal representatives or was limited to the public in the wider sense, meaning all those who are not interested persons. In finding in favour of the Coroner, Lord Justice Maurice Kay and Lord Justice Stanley Burton found that the proper construction of the rule was the power to exclude the wider public and that the Home Secretary was, in effect, attempting to pre-empt legislation which is either not yet in force or has been rejected in the recent past by Parliament. The Divisional Court has ordered that the Home Secretary has until 10 December 2010 to apply for permission to appeal and, if so, whether she wishes to apply for a leapfrog appeal to the Supreme Court.

The 7/7 Inquests continue alongside the legal challenge. The evidence has been completed in respect of the bombers' Travel to London and the bombs at Aldgate and Edgware Road and has now turned to the King's Cross / Russell Square bomb. So far the inquests have heard evidence from approximately 140 witnesses including survivors, london underground employees, police, paramedics and firefighters. Andrew O'Connor and Benjamin Hay are Counsel to the Inquests and Keith Morton, Fiona Canby and Sian Reeves are Counsel for Transport for London.