Secret Policeman's Bill7 March 2009, 9:11 amThere’s yet another piece of government legislation sneaking its way through parliament that will give the state even more privacy but strip away what remaining few rights to privacy you have left. The Coroners and Justice Bill 2009 contain clauses that will give formal cover to perpetrators of state violence and will blow a hole in what little data protection there exists for the public.
The bit dealing with inquests allows the Secretary of State to appoint a judge to hear an inquest into a person’s death in secret - there would be no jury and relatives of the deceased would not be allowed in. A secret hearing can be ordered under a wide range of possibilities: national security, diplomatic relations, for the prevention or detection of crime, to protect the safety of a witness or third party, or on general public interest grounds. In other words the government will have a green light to prevent any embarrassing information about someone’s death being made public knowledge. It’s obvious they want no repeat of the embarrassing revelations that came out in the Jean Charles de Menezes inquiry
Source: kiakanpa's shared items in Google Reader
