Police promising prisoner protected witness status in exchange for statement implicating drug trafficker - Prison Service removing protected witness status when case dropped - no breach of right to life

R (Bloggs 61) v Secretary of State for the Home Department: CA (Lords Justice Auld, Mummery and Keene): 18 June 2003

A prisoner serving seven years for cannabis importation was interviewed by police officers who took statements from him about a suspected drug trafficker who was thought to have ordered several contract killings.

Police told the prisoner that he would serve the rest of his sentence in a protected witness unit, an internally secure part of a prison whose inmates are all known as Bloggs and a number to protect their anonymity.

Because of discrepancies in his statement, the Crown Prosecution Service abandoned its plan to prosecute the suspected trafficker.

The Prison Service then reviewed the prisoner's status and decided it was safe to return him to the general prison population with a suitable cover story, provided his stay in the unit was kept secret.

The judge dismissed his application for judicial review of the Prison Service decision.

The prisoner appealed.

Richard Clayton QC and Robin D Howat (instructed by Glaisyers) for the prisoner; Robert Jay QC (instructed by the Treasury Solicitor) for the secretary of state.

Held, dismissing the appeal, that the police had neither actual nor ostensible authority to promise a prisoner protected witness status; that not even the Prison Service could promise that a prisoner would be in a protected witness unit for the whole of his sentence, since it was obliged to review annually the status of the unit's inmates; that the right to life enshrined in article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights was unqualified, but the court should nonetheless defer to some extent to the special competence of the Prison Service in making a decision going to the safety of an inmate's life; and that the service, together with the police, would generally be better placed than the court to assess the risk to life in such a context.