Yes, let me deal with those questions as well.
As Mr. Shur said, certainly jury members would know about the protection arrangements that witnesses have been put under.
In terms of innocent witnesses, my experience from looking at these programs in the U.K. is that they form a relatively small proportion of the total number of witnesses who go into the programs. But clearly they create particular challenges for witness protection programs, particularly if these are people in various forms of employment who, if they're going to be relocated, may have to find new employment in areas to which they're moving.
In terms of physical protection, my experience is very similar to what Mr. Shur has said: that witnesses who have followed the instructions and regulations of the protection programs they're on have remained safe.
One issue around this is that, certainly from my experience of interviewing witnesses on protection programs, it's not just their physical security that is important; it is their sense of social well-being, their sense of identity, their mental state, which is in some cases almost as important.
I think one of the ironies of witness protection is that in some cases where witnesses have been harmed, it's because they're harming themselves; they've committed suicide. Certainly, the evidence I've seen is that the suicide rate among protected witnesses is higher than it is more generally among the population. This is a reflection of the mental and psychological challenges these people face in trying to develop new lives in new communities.
I suppose in a way that links to the last point you raised, about what might be the best system. I don't think one could point to any one country and say it had the ideal system, but if you were to look at different protection programs, you could ask what the elements of good practice are that we could learn from and perhaps build on to form a good protection program.
That's partly connected with the issues of welfare and support for witnesses, both in the short term and long term. It goes back, again, to points Mr. Shur made earlier on in his evidence about screening witnesses effectively at the outset to make sure they are people who can cope with some of the pressures they will be subject to.
It's also about having a very robust legal framework within which witness protection takes place. One of the difficulties in the U.K. is that we have very little information about witness protection, because it doesn't occur within a clearly defined statutory framework. And this should cover things such as the appeals process that we discussed earlier.
I suppose the one other area where I think there is different practice is in who takes those decisions about who is included and who is excluded from programs. The tradition, in Canada, as in the U.K., is that it is a chief police officer who makes that decision. But there's clearly a very different practice in other parts of Europe, where those decisions are taken away from the police and are given to another body, which might involve representatives of the judiciary, experts on organized crime, and other individuals.
It may be that having that kind of group taking those decisions, one that is slightly removed from the police, may offer a more independent and perhaps more dispassionate view of whom it is appropriate to protect and who would be included and who should be excluded from those programs.