Blowing the whistle on justice

This was a prosecution that should never have been brought, and it is an absolute scandal that Pasquill was put through the mill in this way. The OSA is supposed to protect this country against its enemies; Pasquill’s whistle-blowing alerted the country to the danger into which it was being put by the government’s lethal embrace of Islamist radicals.

It was Pasquill who sent the New Statesman’s Martin Bright the amazing series of internal Foreign Office documents which he duly published, revealing the deeply alarming assumptions behind the government’s strategy for tackling racial Islamism in Britain and shedding light on the policy of extraordinary rendition. As Bright subsequently wrote:

It is difficult to imagine a series of documents that could have been more in the public interest to disclose. Decisions being made in the Foreign Office, with a direct effect on the British people, were taking place with little or no consultation. In particular, the Foreign Office had embarked on a detailed strategy of engagement with Islamists at home and abroad without reference to Parliament or even, it seemed, the Prime Minister himself.

Pasquill’s documents, which were published in the New Statesman and Observer, and gave rise to a Channel Four documentary and a Policy Exchange pamphlet written by Bright which made waves around the world, were of extraordinary importance in helping open British eyes to the dangerous path the government was treading through its profoundly flawed analysis of the Islamist threat and the dangerously wrong-headed strategy of appeasement of the Muslim Brotherhood that followed. They simply transformed the national debate and shamed the government into a (partial) rethink of its policy of embracing Islamist radicals.

The real scandal of Pasquill’s prosecution, however, as Bright wrote here, was that none of the documents passed to Bright was classified as ‘Top Secret’ or even ‘Secret’; indeed, none was classified any higher than ‘Confidential’. According to the Press Association report of today’s case:

Prosecutors told an Old Bailey judge that internal Foreign Office documents disclosed as part of the legal process would have undermined the prosecution case that the leaks were damaging. Julian Knowles, defending, told the court the documents should have been released earlier, saving Mr Pasquill the stress of a 20-month Special Branch investigation.

This prosecution was therefore truly iniquitous. A civil servant has been hung out to dry for 20 months, with the most serious criminal charges to do with compromising national security hanging over his head, over leaks which were known not to have been damaging to national security – in a prosecution which was only halted, it seems, because a trial would have exposed the fact that the Foreign Office knew all along that the documents weren’t damaging.

It is not enough that Derek Pasquill has now finally been acquitted. The Attorney General must now explain precisely what public interest was served by this prosecution, and why it was allowed to drag on to its inevitable démarche -- thus paralysing further informed debate during that period, and ruining a man’s life for serving the public interest along the way.