UNITED KINGDOM
The Guardian
Rowena Mason, political correspondent
Wednesday 31 December 2014
Lady Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, the high court judge forced to stand down as chair of the government child abuse inquiry, has been criticised for suggesting survivors are at risk of causing problems with the investigation.
Peter Saunders, the chief executive of the National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac), hit back after Butler-Sloss warned it would be difficult to find a chair for the inquiry who was sufficiently removed from the establishment to satisfy victims groups. Both Butler-Sloss and the City lawyer Dame Fiona Woolf resigned from the role after survivors of abuse objected to their links to senior Westminster politicians.
However, Saunders said Butler-Sloss was wrong to imply survivors were holding the government hostage over the selection of the chair, when it was the Home Office that had made two bad choices.
Survivor groups just wanted to get to the truth and for the process to be overseen by an appropriate candidate with no conflicts of interest, he said.
Butler-Sloss stepped down in July because her late brother Sir Michael Havers had been attorney general in the 1980s and his actions would have been subject to investigation by the inquiry. Her successor, Woolf, was also forced to resign because she was a friend and neighbour of Leon Brittan, who was home secretary at the time of the alleged child abuse.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday, Butler-Sloss said she worried that “the victims and survivors – for who I have the most enormous sympathy, and as a judge I tried a great many child abuse cases – for them to be deciding who should be the person chairing it creates real problems”.
She suggested that anyone qualified to chair such an inquiry would have experience that would lead him or her to be branded as being part of the establishment.
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