Jess Phillips hopes supreme court ‘sees sense’ and overturns domestic abuse ruling
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The Labour MP Jess Phillips has said she hopes the UK’s highest court “sees sense” and overturns a ruling preventing a domestic abuse survivor from suing Sussex police and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) for disclosing her address to her violent ex-partner.
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Phillips said that if the supreme court upheld the court of appeal’s decision when it hears the case on Wednesday and Thursday, it would prevent police from being held accountable for failures in cases of violence against women and girls.
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The address of the woman, anonymised as XGY in court proceedings, was disclosed by a CPS lawyer during a magistrates hearing in which a condition was sought preventing her former partner, who was accused of raping her and threatening to kill and throw acid on her, from entering the road where she was living. Sussex police had not marked the address as confidential when sending it to the CPS. The woman moved home as a result of the disclosure.
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Witnesses and lawyers in court traditionally have what is known as “core immunity”. Ruling last year that XGY could not sue Sussex police and the CPS, the court of appeal said this immunity applied beyond evidential matters and also to a broad range of police activity, including matters outside the courtroom relating to an investigation.
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Phillips, a former minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, said: “Hopefully the supreme court will see sense. I’ve been part of many different cases, where both the police and the CPS, have been held accountable in civil remedy, regarding their failures.
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“This isn’t just that I want people to be able to make financial claims against the police. Often these cases where there’s been failures lead to longer-term change for victims of domestic abuse and sexual violence, like police failures within the grooming cases for example – charging women with crimes rather than helping them as victims.
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“Criminal law in cases of domestic abuse has seen decades of failure so civil law is used to try and make the systems better and nowhere more so than in violence against women and girls.” She stressed that it was for the supreme court to reach its own decision but, along with fellow MPs David Davis and Andrew Mitchell, Phillips has tabled an amendment to a bill that would counteract the effect of the court of appeal’s ruling if it was not overturned, as it created “a precedent that was never intended by parliament”.
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She said if there was one agency that had improved its approach to violence against women over the past 20 years it was the police but described the court of appeal ruling as “chilling”, adding: “I don’t think it helps the police or the CPS.
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I don’t think the idea that they can’t be held accountable is something that they need at the moment or should want because there’s a real problem with how victims of domestic abuse perceive the police. “Inquiry after inquiry, the Sarah Everard murder, Charing Cross [the police station where officers were filmed making racist and misogynistic comments], there are reasons why women don’t have faith in the police and that’s not good for the police and it’s not good for change in the future.
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So I don’t want to see a sort of really wide-ranging exemption for police to be held accountable with civil action.” XGY said: “More than six years later, I’m still living with the impact of what happened and the loss of the security I thought I’d finally found. “I’ve continued with this case because I believe survivors should be able to trust that the information they share to protect themselves will be kept confidential.
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If that trust is broken, there should be accountability.” The CPS and Sussex police were approached for comment.
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