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Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee 23 February 2022

23 Feb 2022 · S6 · Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee

Item of business

Continued Petitions

Witchcraft Act 1563 (Pardon and Memorial) (PE1855)

Claire Mitchell Watch on SPTV

We of course acknowledge that these things happened a very long time ago. That is a relevant and necessary question for us to be able to answer. My first answer is that there is no time limit on justice. It was wrong when it happened; those people were not guilty of those offences and they paid a terrible price, in the most brutal way. That they were convicted and killed as witches was wrong then and it is wrong now. Rather than, “Why would we do this now, hundreds of years later?”, we might ask, “Why didn’t we do this hundreds of years ago—why has it taken until now to address that point in Scottish history?” I very much believe that the answer is that history is written by the victors. It was not written by the people who could not write—the ordinary people who could not record their history in that way. As such, the history of witchcraft in Scotland has fallen to the side. It has been an academic exercise, but not one for the general public. In respect of the question that you ask about changing times and how we can square what happened then with the modern day, one of the things that really encouraged me to lodge this petition was the recent parliamentary decision to pardon people who were convicted of homosexual offences many years ago. What the Parliament said when it granted the pardon to those people who were convicted of same-sex offences was that those people ought never to have been criminalised, as the thing that they did is not a crime. That is true for those people—I heartily endorse that—and it is also true for the people who were killed as witches. One other thing that I reflect on when we talk about these events being a long time ago is that, although 300 or 400 years seems like a long time, it is the blink of an eye in the grand scale of history. We still talk about things that affected Scotland 300 or 400 years ago—those things are important to us. Once again, I hesitate to say it, but the history that we know better is to do with, for example, battles that happened a considerably longer time ago than that, and we still reflect upon and learn from those things. I hope that, in the modern day, we can reflect upon what happened during the period that the petition is concerned with and bring those reflections to the 21st century in a way that is of use. People say, “What’s the point? It was hundreds of years ago and you can’t help those people now.” To that, I say that we can do something to help them: we can try to restore those people properly to history as people who suffered a miscarriage of justice—that is the first thing—but we can also, as citizens, reflect upon what caused what happened to happen and why people who were in a vulnerable situation were subject to allegations and were used in a power structure that meant that they paid with their lives. We can reflect on that wrong and vow to do better. As Zoe Venditozzi has said, more broadly, it is a symbol for the world. She might want to say a bit more about that.

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Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee 23 February 2022

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