Lawyers Back Call for National Child Abuse Inquiry to Name Perpetrators

By Sandra Laville
The Guardian
March 1, 2017

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/01/lawyer-national-child-abuse-inquiry-name-perpetrators

Two young boys carry their luggage to the boat train as they leave Liverpool Street station in London bound for Auckland, New Zealand in 1950. Photograph: AP

Lawyers have called for more transparency from the national child abuse inquiry over the naming of the perpetrators after their identities were withheld from the public hearings.

Aswini Weereratne QC, who represents the Child Migrant Trust, said she was unhappy about the ciphering of the names of abusers at the public hearing particularly as many of them are now dead.

“I want to put it on the record,” she said. “Really it is about the naming of abusers. It is really an issue of open justice that they should be heard.” Weereratne was speaking on the second day of the inquiry’s first public hearings. She indicated she may challenge the whole basis on which the redaction of abusers’ names was being applied.

She told the hearing that the trust was trying to help by providing information to the inquiry about which perpetrators might be dead. “We consider it a matter of the principle of open justice that there should be as much openness about the naming of the perpetrators,” she said.

On Monday David Hill, a former child migrant, called for perpetrators of abuse to be named and shamed by the inquiry. He said: “What is important for survivors of sexual abuse is where the inquiry is satisfied with the evidence, name the villains.”

Imran Khan, who represents a former child migrant, Oliver Cosgrove, joined Weereratne’s bid for more openness.

He said: “It maybe that we need to reconsider the redaction protocol. Simple searches of the internet gives cemeteries where [the perpetrators] are buried.”

Henrietta Hill QC, for the inquiry, said it had to balance principles of open justice and the wishes of individual survivors with fairness to those who were accused. “The inquiry is not determining criminal or civil liability,” she said. “The focus of the inquiry is on the institutional responses.”

She revealed that the inquiry had sent letters on Monday to the institutions where perpetrators had worked, to ask them to provide information about which individuals were dead and which were alive.

The inquiry opened its first public hearings on Monday more than two and a half years after being set up by the then home secretary Theresa May.