Criminal justice: no way forward
01 November 1993
At a conference organised by the Legal Action Group on 6 November 1993, speakers including Mike McConville, Makbool Javaid, Lee Bridges and Anne Owers explained why the Royal Commission report was no bulwark against the erosions of justice proposed by Home Secretary Michael Howard. The tone was set by Ann Whelan, who has campaigned for fifteen years for the release of her son Michael Hickey and those wrongly convicted with him for the murder of Carl Bridgwater. The conference was reminded of the function of the Royal Commission when it was first announced: to remedy miscarriages of justice, and reminded of the betrayal of that task through what was described as "institutional capture".
Mike McConville pointed out that even the retention of the right to silence was not advocated by the Commission on principled grounds - that the calling on an accused to help prove his own guilt and the use of his silence as part of the prosecution case, undermines the fundamental principle that the burden is on the prosecution - but on the ground that abolition increases the psychological burden on an accused.