Thank you very much for the invitation to speak to your committee.
In my statement I really want to make three general points: first, about my own background and involvement in witness protection issues; second, I was going to say a little bit about the U.K. experience and how it compares to witness protection in other parts of Europe; and third, to raise a couple of general issues about the effectiveness of witness protection and issues of legitimacy.
To take the first point in terms of my own background, my first involvement with witness protection issues was through a piece of research done for the Scottish government. This was an in-depth evaluation of the Strathclyde Police Witness Protection Programme, which operates in Scotland and involved entities with police officers, with protected witnesses, and with members of the judiciary.
Then a second project I undertook for the U.K. Home Office was really looking at ways of facilitating witness cooperation in organized crime cases, and part of that investigation meant comparing how witness protection in the U.K. operated with respect to witness protection in other parts of Europe, the U.S., Canada, and Australia. That's my background.
I would say a little bit about the U.K. experience. Witness protection in the U.K. really began in the 1970s, pioneered by the Metropolitan Police Service in London and by the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Most of the people they were dealing with were involved in organized crime and terrorist cases.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, an increasing number of police forces in the U.K. established their own witness protection programs, largely in response to organized crime, particularly drug-related cases that involved the murder or attempted murder of witnesses. Basically, a very ad hoc arrangement emerged across the U.K., with individual police forces running their own witness protection programs.
I guess the next most significant development from the U.K. perspective was in 2005 when the government passed the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, which included a section on the protection of witnesses and other persons. That defined the eligibility for protection, the powers of the police to make arrangements with other police forces for protecting witnesses, and the duties of other agencies to assist the police in relocating witnesses.
The arrangements in the U.K. are very much modelled on the United States Federal Witness Security Program, which I'm sure you're familiar with, or Mr. Shur will speak about in more detail.
I want to make four points about the comparison between witness protection in the U.K. and what happens elsewhere in the world.
The first point relates to the eligibility criteria, who is allowed into witness protection programs. What we found when we looked at witness protection from an international perspective was that all jurisdictions share a common emphasis on the risk to the witness, the nature of the proceedings in which the witness is giving evidence, the importance of their testimony, and their ability to adjust to being on a witness protection program.
There are significant differences between jurisdictions in relation to the role that the police, the judiciary, and the government play in decisions about inclusion in protection programs. The U.K. is similar to Canada and Australia in allowing such decisions to be taken by chief police officers, but if you look at a country like Belgium, decisions about who is included are taken by a witness protection board comprising public prosecutors, the police, and members of the justice and interior ministries. If you look at Italy, there's a central commission chaired by the undersecretary of state, comprising judges and experts on organized crime.
So there are quite significant differences in who takes those decisions about who is included.
There are also significant differences between countries in terms of the specification in law of the types of protection and support available to witnesses. If you look at the U.K. case, in none of the legislation does it specify what protection is available. By contrast--obviously it is your experience in Canada and elsewhere in places like Australia--there's much more detail about what kind of support and protection is available.
One final point is that there are very significant differences between jurisdictions in terms of the kind of institutional architecture of witness protection programs. In the U.K., witness protection is very much a local matter for individual chief police officers, whereas other countries operate national or federal protection programs. If you look at France and Italy, you find that witness protection is organized on a regional level. But there are some attempts within Europe, through the European police organization Europol, to kind of coordinate good practice between the different European states.
My final couple of points relate to two wider issues relating to witness protection. One concerns how we evaluate its effectiveness and the other concerns issues of perceived legitimacy. In terms of measures of effectiveness, certainly the work that I have carried out demonstrates that witness protection in the U.K. has been highly effective in terms of securing the physical safety of witnesses and increasing the efficiency of investigations by taking the responsibility for protecting witnesses away from an investigating team and giving those witnesses to a specialist unit.
One of the areas where I think in the U.K. witness protection has perhaps been less effective is in terms of meeting some of the welfare needs of witnesses. One of the big challenges for witness protection programs is how you deal with the social well-being of witnesses in the long term in terms of giving them support and helping them to cope with some of the psychological challenges of living in new communities.
I think one of the other issues around effectiveness that some people have commented on is whether witness protection might lead to the displacement of the focus of those who would seek to harm witnesses onto other groups, particularly members of juries. Is there a danger that by investing all our resources in protecting witnesses that we displace the problem of witness intimidation onto other groups? I think that in essence is a matter for debate and discussion.
The final point I would make—and again there has been some speculation about this in the research—is on the perceived legitimacy of witness protection programs. Some people have raised questions about the perceived morality and fairness to the public of programs that relocate people who generally have a very long history of criminal activity and who are placed in communities where often members of those communities are unaware of these people's past and so on. I think there are some concerns about how the public would perceive witness protection arrangements, and particularly about their own safety if they're living in communities where relocated witnesses have been placed.
That concludes my opening statement.
