Chamber and committees

There is then the question of awareness. There have been examples that relate to your assessment of the current position. In some circumstances just now, people will be able to publish information because there is no lifelong anonymity protection in place. However, the point that I am interested in is how people will become aware of the obligation on every one of us who decides to impart anything in the public domain, which will carry should the legislation be enacted? What have you learned from international best practice about how that can be most effectively communicated?

We have before us, as you will have observed, a complex bill with many different elements. You are very experienced in respect of the particular element that we are discussing. What can we reflect on, in our feedback to Government, with regard to the importance of ensuring that people know what the law will be if the bill is enacted?

I am grateful. I would like to follow up on Mr Findlay’s question and the Lord Advocate’s answer.

What the Lord Advocate has put on the record is very welcome, but it raises the question in my mind of whether any of that needs to be formalised beyond the basis of what has been agreed by the Government and the Crown. We have reached a place of welcome understanding, and the independence of the Crown has been clarified and assured. Does the Lord Advocate believe that any degree of formalisation is required, beyond what has been arrived at so far?

I am grateful for that answer. It may be that we require not legislative change but rather a memorandum of understanding, or something of that nature. It would be helpful if that could be explored; we can also explore it with the cabinet secretary when we see her next week. I am grateful for that clarification.

Thank you for that. That answer gets into some of the territory that links with other parts of the bill with regard to trauma-informed practice. One of the themes of the bill that I have been interested in is that, if that principle is to be faithfully applied in all situations, the courtroom dynamics have to change dramatically as a consequence. Would you agree with that conclusion?

That is really interesting. You have made the point, points were made to us by Lady Dorrian, and the point was made very powerfully to us by the citing of a case by the Lord Advocate in the same evidence session on 10 January. In that case, the Court of Appeal laid down a very hard judgment about the conduct of a case in 2020, which is not terribly long ago. I have read the judgment of the Court of Appeal, which makes grim reading in 21st century Scotland. When I read that as a member of Parliament, I think to myself that we had better legislate for that because, even with the direction that I recognise that there has been from the Lord President and the Lord Justice Clerk throughout their tenure in order to improve those issues, there is still a way to go. Mr Di Rollo said that there is still a way to go.

I want to pursue a point that Professor Chalmers made—although it relates to the contributions of all our witnesses—about the adequacy of the research base.

If I have heard it once in my time that we do not have enough research on a subject, I have heard it a million times. The airing of the research this morning has been enormously helpful in informing the committee’s proceedings, and my conclusion is that we should look at all the research in the round and make our judgments out of it. Would it be fair to say that the gold standard of research that we require here is to understand better the deliberative process of individual and collective jurors, and that we will never be able to fully get a hold of that?

In that circumstance, though, we would have a written judgment that we could all pore over.

The necessity of the reform provides the impetus for the action to be undertaken.

Correct.

I will take that example. That strikes me as highly analytical. I understand that point. Mr Di Rollo has just said that, although the culture has changed a lot, it has not changed enough. It still strikes me, as a member of Parliament who is scrutinising a bill on victims, witnesses and justice reform, that there is a risk that victims—complainers—might well be subjected to conduct that, if we do not pass the bill, might not be addressed by the reforms that we might leave for the legal profession to make in a piecemeal fashion.