UNITED KINGDOM
Law Society Gazette
20 July 2015
By Joshua Rozenberg
Much is expected from the largest and most ambitious public inquiry ever established.
The independent inquiry into child sexual abuse seems to have got off to a good start. Lowell Goddard, who served as a high court judge in New Zealand for 20 years before being appointed to chair the inquiry in April, has not been wasting her time.
The government’s most important decision was to start the new statutory inquiry afresh – avoiding some of the pitfalls that beset the non-statutory panel headed first by Baroness Butler-Sloss and then Dame Fiona Woolf. Goddard (pictured below) is sitting with just four experts, three of them lawyers.
The panel no longer includes victims, although one member spent his childhood in care: Ivor Frank is a barrister who now has four decades of experience in child protection, human rights and family law.
The other three members are Professor Malcolm Evans, an international lawyer specialising in freedom of religion and prevention of torture; Drusilla Sharpling, a former chief Crown prosecutor who subsequently inspected policing responses to child abuse; and Professor Alexis Jay, a former director of social services who led the inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham. Ben Emmerson QC remains counsel to the inquiry and the highly experienced Martin Smith, a partner at Fieldfisher, is the inquiry’s solicitor.
Goddard was right to say that victims should be at the centre of the inquiry. But the officials who decided that victims should be members of the earlier inquiry team were misguided in thinking that people with a direct interest in child abuse could be judges in their own cause. Instead, victims and survivors have been appointed to a new consultative panel, which will offer Goddard and her colleagues advice and guidance. There is a separate victims’ and survivors’ liaison group.
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