Phone hacking scandal deepens

[Jan Klimkowski]

Apologies apologies...

Whilst the elephant stomps around the room unnoticed and unreported:

Met police accepts failure to warn phone-hacking victims was unlawful

Police admit legal obligation was breached after phone-hacking victims including John Prescott bring judicial review proceedings

Amelia Hill
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 7 February 2012 13.16 GMT


The Metropolitan police have formally admitted that they were wrong not to warn victims and potential victims of phone hacking that their privacy had been, or might have been, invaded.

Chris Bryant MP, the former deputy prime minister Lord Prescott, the former Met deputy assistant commissioner Brian Paddick, Ben Jackson and an anonymous claimant, HJK, brought judicial review proceedings to challenge the police over failures to warn them their phones had been hacked. They also challenged the police over failures to properly investigate their claims of hacking.

The claim, brought in 2010, was vigorously defended but after the new police investigation into phone hacking, and revelations about the evidence in the hands of the police at the time of the first investigation, the police have finally accepted they breached a legal obligation to warn the phone-hacking victims in 2006 and 2007.

Prescott, who was at the royal courts of justice in London, welcomed the outcome but said it had taken him 19 months to "finally get justice".

"Time and again I was told by the Metropolitan police that I had not been targeted by Rupert Murdoch's News of the World. But I refused to accept this was the case," he said. "Thanks to this judicial review, the Metropolitan police has finally apologised for its failure to inform victims of the criminal acts committed by the News of the World against myself and hundreds of other victims of phone hacking."

Lord Justice Gross and Mr Justice Irwin heard that the two sides had reached agreement on the wording of the declaration.

Bryant said he was "delighted that the Metropolitan police are finally admitting that they should have notified not just me but all the thousands of victims of the News of the World's criminality".

"As I have always maintained this has been a three-headed scandal," he said. "First there was the mass criminality, then there was the massive cover-up and then, from 2007 on, the inexplicable failure of the Met properly to investigate the News of the World or even interrogate the material that they had gathered from [private investigator] Glenn Mulcaire."

Bryant said the Met had "perpetuated the News International 'rogue reporter' myth, let down the victims of this crime and let many of the criminals get away with it. It's a sadness that it has taken all this time to get the Met to admit that they should have notified all the victims and that we had to go to court to secure that admission."

The declaration constitutes an admission by the police that their failure to warn victims that their privacy was or may have been unlawfully invaded was a breach of article 8 of the European convention on human rights, which provides that "everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence".

Tamsin Allen, of Bindmans LLP, who represented the claimants alongside Hugh Tomlinson QC and Alison Macdonald, said the court's decision meant the "legal obligation to warn victims of privacy violations in the phone-hacking case has now been made clear".

"But at the time of the first investigation into phone hacking, instead of warning the hundreds or thousands of victims of voicemail interceptions, the police made misleading statements which gave comfort to News International and permitted the coverup to continue.

"If the police had complied with their obligations under the Human Rights Act in the first place, the history of the phone-hacking scandal would have been very different."

The judicial review was instigated in September 2010 when the police claimed all victims of phone hacking had been given appropriate information and the retired Met assistant commissioner Andy Hayman had written in the Times and the News of the World that there were only a handful of victims and that "no stone had been left unturned" in the handling of the investigation.

But the claimants argued there had been a failure to notify victims, or to give them full and accurate information when they requested it, or to conduct an effective investigation.

The claim was defended on the basis that the claimants were not victims of phone hacking and had been given all relevant information.

That, it transpired, was not true and the Met has now apologised to each of them individually.

The truth is that in August 2006 the police seized a vast amount of documentation containing the names and private information of thousands of people targeted by the royal editor at the News of the World, Clive Goodman, and Mulcaire, and information about numerous other journalists who may have been involved. Lawyers for the claimants said that at one stage the police decided to ensure all victims were warned. "But instead of doing so they sat on the documents and evaded questions from people who suspected they were being hacked," said Allen.

The Metropolitan police said it was "pleased to have reached an agreement in this case and accepts that more should have been done by police in relation to those identified as victims and potential victims of phone hacking several years ago.

"It is a matter of public record that the unprecedented increase in anti-terrorist investigations resulted in the parameters of the original inquiry being tightly drawn and officers considered the prosecution and conviction of Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire as a successful outcome of their investigation."

In a statement, the Met press bureau added that the fact that there were now more than 130 officers involved in the current phone-hacking inquiry Operation Weeting and the two operations being run in conjunction with it "in part reflects the lessons that have been learned about how police should deal with the victims of such crimes".

Tuesday's settlement does not mean damages will be paid by the Met and the court made clear that it sets no precedent for the future. This was welcomed by the police.

"How the MPS treats victims goes to the very heart of what we do," the Met statement said. "It was important that this case did not result in such a wide duty being placed on police officers that it could direct them away from their core purpose of preventing and detecting crime."