A proper law

[Nicholas Bohm]

At 10:18 10/03/2003 +0000, Brian Beesley wrote:

>There was a nugget on the BBC R4 news at 7 am this morning - now we are being
>threatened with intelligence acquired by phone tap being made eligible as
>evidence - apparently the police here in N Ireland want to be able to use
>intercepted phone conversations to convict people of paramilitary activity.
>This power is absolutely unneccessary - if the intellgence services are
>tapping phones already and can understand the conversation (i.e. it's not in
>an unpenetratable dialect or spoken in code words rather than "plain") then
>surely they are in a position to use that intelligence information to
>itercept any planned operation, catching the perpetrators (literally) red
>handed. So why does the phone tap intelligence need to be presented in court,
>let alone be allowed as evidence?

There are arguments that it would be useful to make this material admissible.

First because its use in court would highlight the frequency of tapping in 
a way different from the annual publication of statistics, and might bring 
pressure for improvements to the warranting and oversight regime.

Secondly because it could make useful material available to the defence 
under the "equality of arms" principle implied by EConHR Article 6.

>Regards

Nicholas

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