In one of his first public appearances since stepping down as DPP in November 2013, Keir Starmer QC rejected characterisations of the muchmaligned Human Rights Act as a ‘villains’ charter’. ‘If you plot what the Human Rights Act has done for defendants, against what it has done for victims, there’s no comparison’, he told the audience of around 100 lawyers and campaigners. Gains in victims’ rights have far exceeded those of defendants, he said. He described the Act as ‘carefully crafted’ and said it would be a mistake to amend it.

Before the Human Rights Act, victims’ rights had no ‘traction’, said Starmer. ‘If you wanted to force the police to investigate a serious offence, you couldn’t go to common law. The common law never imposed that obligation on the police. The Human Rights Act did that, and so there was this traction that wasn’t previously there.’

Starmer said victims should no longer be treated as ‘bystanders’ by the criminal justice system. He described the introduction in June 2013 by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) of a victims’ review, as ‘one of the most significant victim initiatives ever launched’ by the service. Part of the review’s strength is its simplicity. ‘Anybody whose case is not charged, or if your case is charged and then discontinued, you, the victim, have a right to review. You don’t need a lawyer; you don’t need a form; you don’t need to identify a ground on which you’re asking for a review. You simply ask for a review.

It’s about as straightforward as it’s possible to be.’ Previously, the only option for victims or bereaved families wanting to challenge a CPS decision was by judicial review, a route which is ‘costly and slow and beyond the reach of many citizens’.

Before becoming DPP, Starmer had been best known as a defence and human rights barrister but, during questions, he denied that he had gone ‘from the trenches of the defence into the prosecution in one leap’. His involvement in victims’ rights long pre-dated his 2008 appointment, he said.

‘Ever since the Human Rights Act came in, I was very often acting for victims who felt that the state had not properly responded to what had gone wrong in their case. Therefore, I was spending a good deal of my time challenging the police and the prosecution to do their job properly.’ Moving to the CPS ‘wasn’t actually such a dramatic step as has been made out’, he said. (Shortly after the LAG lecture, Starmer was announced as head of a Labour Party taskforce into creating a ‘victims’ law’.)

One of the first cases across Starmer’s desk when he became DPP resulted from the suicide of university student Daniel James in 2008, who killed himself after becoming paraplegic when a rugby scrum collapsed. Although there was ‘more than enough’ evidence to prosecute James’s parents for assisting their son’s suicide, Starmer ruled against prosecution on public interest grounds.

Later, following the House of Lords ruling in the Debbie Purdy case, where she sought to clarify whether or not her husband risked prosecution if he helped her travel to a clinic abroad to die, Starmer issued guidelines setting out his approach to assisted-suicide prosecutions: ‘That was the first time in legal history the courts had required the DPP to produce an offence-specific policy. It was quite a significant ruling’, he said.

Since their introduction in 2010, and contrary to some predictions, the guidelines had worked well, he added. Of the 85 assisted suicide cases since then, there had been decisions not to prosecute in 64; 11 cases were withdrawn by police; nine were still under consideration; and there had been just one prosecution. Those guidelines ‘preserve the contract between society and the enforcement of criminal law, and allow for rigorous prosecutions where necessary, but acts of compassion and mercy where appropriate’.

He had, therefore, issued guidance that prosecutions should only be brought where a communication ‘goes beyond what could conceivably be tolerable or acceptable in an open and diverse society which upholds and respects freedom of expression’. He cited one such case where a young man had been prosecuted and imprisoned after leaving a message on the Facebook tribute page for the murdered five-year-old April Jones, that was ‘so offensive that no media outlet has ever repeated any part of it’.

During questions, Starmer dismissed as ‘completely wrong’ earlier media reports that he had personally intervened in the ‘Twitter joke’ case to ensure that the CPS contested Paul Chambers’ appeal. Far from insisting that the CPS resist the appeal, Starmer had asked his staff to contact Chambers’ legal team to see if the case could be settled.

The first time Starmer became aware of the case was when it reached the Divisional Court, after Chambers had already been convicted in both the magistrates’ court and Crown Court for sending a jokey tweet about blowing up Robin Hood airport if it failed to re-open in time for his flight a week later. However, Starmer was subsequently advised that the case wasn’t the DPP’s to settle. ‘The legal advice I got was this is a case-stated appeal, which is technically an appeal against the Crown Court decision. So the case was between Paul Chambers and the judge in the Crown Court who had convicted him. I was politely told, therefore, “You can’t settle it. You are not the defendant. The findings are fact by the judge.” So that was the end of that.’ Persistent reports that he had stopped settlement to somehow ‘save face’ were, he said, ridiculous.

Tomlinson died during the 2009 G-20 protests after being struck and then pushed over by Harwood. The first pathologist in this case, Freddy Patel, concluded that Tomlinson had died of natural causes, but this finding was challenged when a second post-mortem was carried out. Starmer recalled the moment he discovered that Patel had disposed of a crucial fluid sample taken from Tomlinson’s body, which would be essential for confirming the cause of death. ‘I said to him, “I’m going to have to analyse this”, and he said, “You can’t.” I said, “Why not?” and he said, “I’ve thrown it away.” I said, “Well, I know you throw most of it away, but you’ll have kept a sample, and we only need a sample because we need to know what the composition is.” He said, “No. I chucked it all away.” Before any other pathologist or expert ever saw the body, he’d thrown the entire sample away.’