Coroners and Justice Bill

My Lords, at the beginning of 2008, following the delays in implementing many of the recommendations that arose from the murder of patients by Dr Harold Shipman and the subsequent murder in 2002 of patients at Leeds General Infirmary by the nurse Colin Norris, I tabled a series of Questions to the Government, which were answered on 25 March and 21 May 2008. In response, the Government indicated their intention to legislate, and I welcome large parts of the Bill before us today. The Shipman murders led to an inquiry that published six reports and 228 recommendations, at a cost to the public purse of £21 million. Weaknesses were discovered in the death certification process, in the requirement for one doctor alone to certify a death and to decide on referral to a coroner, and in the failure to cross-reference notified deaths and to look for trends and patterns. Among the recommendations were many other proposals to strengthen the system of public protection. After the trial, the Shipman inquiry, chaired by Dame Janet Smith, decided there was enough evidence to suggest that Shipman had probably killed around 250 people, of whom 218 could positively be identified. About 80 per cent of his victims were women. In the case of nurse Colin Norris, he was convicted on 8 March 2008 of murdering four elderly patients and attempting to murder another. I recognise that the Bill goes some way to try and prevent a repetition of these appalling crimes, but I should like to hear from the Government how many of the 228 recommendations of the Shipman inquiry have been incorporated into this legislation and what further measures will be needed to deal with the failings identified by the Norris inquiry. In addressing end-of-life issues, this question of public protection must surely be our paramount concern. It is why the Government have rightly resisted any attempts to use the Bill to make assistance with suicide or the killing of patients legal. In any event, during the life of this Parliament in your Lordships’ House we have had the benefit of a Select Committee and several Private Members’ Bills, while, on the most recent vote that was taken in this House, the proposal to permit assisted suicide was defeated by a substantial majority. Constitutionally, the correct place for this matter to be tested is surely in another place. I agree with the Minister that to use the Bill in that way would be quite wrong. In the context of this Bill, there would be no logic in making the law more restrictive in dealing with doctors and nurses who set out to take the lives of their patients, such as Shipman or Norris, while simultaneously giving a green light to the approval of euthanasia. By amending the Suicide Act 1961, this Bill also rightly outlaws predatory websites that encourage or promote suicide. It introduces an offence of encouraging or assisting suicide. It would make no sense and defy logic—and, indeed, introduce a dangerous, contradictory fault line—if we were to make it an offence to promote suicide on the internet and then to approve the promotion of suicide overseas. The prohibition on the promotion of suicide is a good and welcome provision, and nothing should be placed in the Bill which contradicts or weakens our determination to protect the vulnerable. Our laws are tough, but they are administered with compassion and common sense. It is not a fudge, as some noble Lords have suggested, to leave open the possibility of prosecution where motives are shown, for instance, to be pecuniary gain. Merely because some people have not been prosecuted is not a reason for setting aside a law that has protected many thousands of people. I would briefly remind your Lordships that when it was decided to allow voluntary euthanasia in Holland it led to involuntary euthanasia. Nearly 1,000 deaths a year are involuntary out of a total of 4,000. So we need to be clear where we are proceeding if we give the green light to what is being suggested. It is, of course, the reason why all of the Royal Colleges and the British Medical Association take the view, shared by the Government, that the law should not be changed. My second point—and here I will follow my noble friend Lady D’Souza, the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Crosby, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, and the noble Baroness, Lady O’Cathain—concerns the question of genocide charges and bringing charges against those who have committed crimes against humanity in other jurisdictions. Several of us in this House, while Members of another place, took part in the parliamentary passage of the War Crimes Act 1991. That dealt with suspected Nazi-era war criminals who had made their way to these shores during the chaos that followed the Second World War. During those proceedings, the noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew, made a memorable and moving speech, where he began by drawing our attention to what he described as an "unregisterable interest". Two of his grandparents, two of his uncles, an aunt and many cousins were killed during the Holocaust. They were doctors, teachers and postmasters—normal people murdered because of their racial origins. I know he would not mind my bringing this painful memory to the attention of the House, because his purpose in 1991 was to remind his listeners that they should not forget the victims—not just the dead, but also the living: especially the living, who often crave justice just as any other victim of any so-called "normal" crime would do. The Nazi Holocaust holds a particular horror for the world, and rightly so. That is why Parliament eventually passed the War Crimes Act 1991, which specifically related to crimes committed in Nazi-occupied Europe. However, the victims and survivors of modern genocides and crimes also want justice. My noble friend Lady D’Souza raised the issue of the Rwandan suspected genocidaires, who can neither be extradited to face trial nor prosecuted here. I visited Rwanda in 2004 and published a report in October of that year through the British charity the Jubilee Campaign. In paragraph 3.28 of the report, I described the Murambi genocide site in south-west Rwanda. Murambi was a technical college, which, as I said, ""served to remind us of the hellish reality of Rwanda’s recent past."" The school is a collection of long, single-story brick buildings, situated on the top of a hill, with 66 classrooms. At the beginning of the genocide, many Tutsi Rwandans sought safety in numbers and gathered in churches, public buildings and schools. Thousands of men, women and children—including the children from a nearby orphanage—fled up the hill to Murambi. The authorities told them that they would be safe there, but then cut off the water and electricity supplies. They survived for two weeks until 3 am on 21 April 1994. Then, Interahamwe militiamen—Interahamwe means "those who work together"—and soldiers arrived, and they surrounded the school. Armed with guns and grenades, they began killing. They killed for over six hours. By the morning, thousands of civilians were dead. Only four survived, unconscious and left for dead by the murderers. In my report I described how: ""56,000 bodies were found there, and we walked from classroom to classroom, viewing 852 remains that have been disinterred. Within a few days of the massacre, a volleyball court had been built on top of one of the mass graves which, we were told, the French peacekeepers then used in their leisure time"." Murambi is now a memorial. Some of the mass graves have been excavated. The classrooms are filled with human remains. In some cases the corpses have been preserved in quicklime and retain tufts of hair and recognisable features. In the classrooms lie thousands of white skeletons, sometimes frozen in the positions in which they fell. It is as if a man-made Pompeii had swept over the hill and through the buildings. Some still clutch their rosaries; some of the women were clearly pregnant and skulls bear the marks of the machetes used to hack them down. It takes a lot of planning to kill thousands of people: orders must be given for roadblocks to be set up; petrol must be requisitioned for the vehicles that transport the killers up the hill; grenades and ammunition must be distributed to the soldiers; avid killers need to be praised, and slackers exhorted to work harder and to kill faster. Genocide is a vast criminal enterprise. It is alleged that some of the criminals responsible for what happened at Murambi have visited the United Kingdom, and that some are still here. However, due to what the former Director of Public Prosecutions has called jurisdictional gaps—these have been identified in your Lordships’ House today—amounting to impunity gaps, suspects from Rwanda and some other modern atrocities cannot be prosecuted here. Those are gaps that we need to fill. The accusations that I have mentioned are included in the original ruling by the Westminster Magistrates' Court. These accusations are also repeated in documents filed at the international criminal tribunal for Rwanda—disturbing documents which I have with me here in the Chamber and which I have read. Ten days ago I chaired a public lecture in Liverpool given by Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the Prosecutor for the International Criminal Court. He emphasised the need for jurisdictions like our own to strengthen our domestic provisions in hunting down the perpetrators of genocide and crimes against humanity. This Bill gives us the chance to accede to that request and to ensure that we are no safe haven for those who would avoid prosecution. Like the War Crimes Act, it would not turn Britain into a global court, but neither would it allow these islands to be used as a bolthole for men such as those who orchestrated events at Murambi.