Official Report search · Parliament Workbench

Committee

Justice Committee 13 April 2010

13 Apr 2010 · S3 · Justice Committee

Item of business

Criminal Justice and Licensing (Scotland) Bill: Stage 2

Nigel Don (North East Scotland) (SNP) Watch on SPTV

I will briefly address amendment 378. As James Kelly noted, we have received several submissions on the issue. I do not buy them lock, stock and barrel, but there are important points in them. First, nowhere does the proposed new section describe the mischief that it seeks to address. That makes it wide ranging, so the court would be looking for any behaviour that happened to fit within the words. I wonder whether that is appropriate. Perhaps the provision should be drafted to address stalking specifically, if that is the intention, and any other issues that it is intended to address specifically. Obviously, that cannot be done now—it would be a stage 3 addition. I am slightly concerned that amendment 378 is too wide ranging and that the court and the Crown would get no inkling as to where the limits were intended to be.Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, amendment 378 might make it difficult to say uncomfortable things in public. We as MSPs will appreciate this point. I go back to my days as a councillor, when I once had to address a public meeting on a local housing issue. The folk in the area did not particularly want to hear what I had to say to them, but I could make the points perfectly reasonably and the perfectly reasonable people in the room could hear them reasonably—they did not like what they heard, but they did not take offence. However, if a perfectly reasonable person in that meeting had been sitting next to somebody who was plainly agitated and had already made it clear that they were not happy with what was going to be said, it would perhaps have been reckless of me to say something, because that would have put the perfectly reasonable person in fear that the unreasonable person sitting next to them would react in a way that would be violent, aggressive or a breach of the peace.By my reading, and that of others, that situation seems to be caught by the amendment. We would therefore find ourselves drifting in a situation in which the aggressive complainer could hold a public event to ransom. The fact that somebody might get cross about something could prevent people from saying things that were perfectly reasonable for anybody else to hear. I am deliberately pushing the situation to the limit to make the point that amendment 378 might be a little too wide ranging and might have unintended consequences. Am I happy that the Crown, the police and the courts can sort out such matters? Yes, but I am conscious that we are considering creating law whose boundaries would not be defined in the bill, and I think that the police, the Crown and the courts could do with a little more guidance on what we are trying to achieve.

Search Hansard contributions

Justice Committee 13 April 2010

In the same item of business