By IRNA
London : Measures in the new Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill will infringe human rights in the UK and should be amended or dropped, an all-party parliamentary committee warned Friday.
The bill lays out proposals across policy areas as diverse as blasphemy laws, dealing with prostitution, youth offending and the proposed ban on prison workers striking.
It has been described by the government as an exercise in “rebalancing the criminal justice system in favour of the law abiding majority.”
But the Joint Select Committee on Human Rights (JCHR) warned that there were many serious implications for the rights and freedoms of UK citizens.
“This is yet another criminal justice bill with potentially enormous implications for human rights in this country,” said JCHR chair Andrew Dismore. “We have serious questions about the Government’s justification for some of these proposals,” he said.
Dismore said there were particular concerns “whether the Government is seeking to protect public safety in the face of genuine threats or using legislation to deal with exaggerated public perceptions about crime levels.”
The committee found that the bill lacked adequate safeguards around the detention or imprisonment of children, and failed to ensure that children will get publicly funded legal representation.
It also expressed concerns about the legal framework for the new “community sentence for youth,” which are described as Youth Rehabilitation Orders.
The all-party group of MPs also called for the proposed limit on compensation to the victims of miscarriages of justice, for example, someone who had been wrongly convicted of a criminal offence and spent time in prison, to be scrapped.
The new crime of possessing “extreme” pornography was said to be too vague and the criteria too subjective, while new “Violent Offender Orders” were also “not well defined and represent another resort to methods of control outside the proper criminal process.” The Committee also questioned the independence of the proposed new Commissioner for Offender Management and Prisons. Dismore said he was now “pleased the Government has seen sense and dropped the plan to replace the independent Prisons and Probation Ombudsman.”