Coroners – Inquests – National security – Terrorism

R (on the application of Secretary of State for the Home Department) v HM Coroner for Inner West London: DC (Lords Justices Maurice Kay, Stanley Burnton): 30 November 2010

The claimant secretary of state applied for judicial review of a decision of the defendant coroner not to conduct part of the inquests into the deaths of the victims of the July 7, 2005 London bombings as a closed hearing, excluding the bereaved families and their legal representatives.

During the course of the inquest, the coroner ruled that she would be inquiring into the preventability of the bombings, including whether there had been failures on the part of the security service and police force to properly investigate and assess the intelligence in relation to two of the bombers, and whether any of the alleged failings contributed to, or were causative of, the events of July 7.

Given the sensitive nature of the evidence the secretary of state sought a closed hearing. The coroner refused. The issue for determination was whether rule 17 of the Coroners Rules 1984 empowered the coroner to exclude properly interested persons and their legal representatives, including the bereaved families, from part of an inquest and to receive and later take into account closed material received in their absence.

Held: The construction of rule 17 adopted by the coroner was correct. Rule 17 provided that, while inquests should be held in public, the coroner could exclude ‘the public’ if it was in the interests of national security. The essence of the construction issue was whether ‘the public’ in the proviso to rule 17 meant that ‘any person’, or whether it only applied to those who were not properly interested persons and their legal representatives. The first sentence of rule 17 recognised the fundamental principle of legal proceedings, namely, that they should be heard in public unless there was good reason for them not to be. In the first part of rule 17, the natural meaning of ‘public’ was persons other than properly interested persons. There was no reason to ascribe any other meaning to ‘public’ in the proviso. Specific and clear words would have been required to qualify the rights of properly interested persons. There was no power under the rules for a coroner to choose which properly interested persons could be present during a closed hearing. To suggest otherwise would be to rewrite rule 17 and put the coroner in the invidious position of having to say she trusted certain parties but not others. Construing ‘the public’ as meaning ‘any person’ failed to acknowledge that the words ‘any person’ were used by the draftsman elsewhere in the rules.

Furthermore, under section 8(3) of the Coroners Act 1988 a coroner was obliged to summon a jury in certain circumstances. Rule 17 applied equally to inquests with or without a jury. It could not have been contemplated that a properly interested person and his legal representative would be excluded, while a jury saw and heard the closed material. The fact that inquests were inquisitorial did not diminish their context as essentially judicial procedures, which were governed by the principle of open justice except to the extent that the principle was limited by statutory provision (see paras 15, 23- 24, 36-38 of judgment).

Application refused.

James Eadie QC, Jonathan Hall (instructed by the Treasury Solicitor) for the claimant; Hugo Keith QC, Andrew O’Connor, Benjamin Hay (instructed by the in-house solicitor) for the defendant; Patrick O’Connor QC, Caoilfhionn Gallagher, Christopher Coltart (instructed by Anthony Gold, Kingsley Napley, Sonn Macmillan Walker, Hogan Lovell, Russell Jones & Walker) for the interested parties (some bereaved families); John Beggs QC, Ian Skelt for the chief constable of West Yorkshire Police; Max Hill QC for the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis; Guy Vassall-Adams for media organisations.