“The law is an ass” is an English expression of almost four hundred years of age. While credit for inventing the very first use of it has been argued over, there is no doubt that it was Charles Dickens in his Oliver Twist of 1838 who began the popularity of combining law and judges with donkeys.
In a court hearing, Dickens wrote, Mr Bumble — victim of a woman whom he wanted to marry for her money, but who turned out to be more domineering than he expected — was told that “the law supposes that your wife acts under your direction”. “ ‘If the law supposes that,’ said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, ‘the law is a ass – a idiot’”. Dickens’s characterization of Bumble – self-important, stupid, hypocritical – has turned into the noun bumbledom, which describes the pomposity of petty officials of the state.
An expert source claims that Bumble’s expression has been gaining steadily in popularity over the past 186 years.
And so it has also come to pass — more uniquely than ever before in English legal history, more than even Dickens can have imagined — that a retired English judge named Anthony Hughes (lead image, left) – titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley — has put on public display his personal combination of all three — Bumble, Bumbledom, and the law as an ass.
Hughes did this in a five-page ruling he issued on September 23. Hughes is directing the secret inquiry into two events on the British Government’s road to war against Russia in the Ukraine — the alleged Russian Novichok poisoning of Dawn Sturgess of June 2018, following the alleged Russian Novichok attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal of March 2018.
Sturgess died; the Skripals survived. The book tells the full story.
Hughes has ruled the Skripals will not and must not be called to give evidence, neither in open court, nor by remote videolink, nor in tape-recorded voice, nor even in the written transcript of what English police claim the Skripals said under questioning in 2018.
The two survivors of the only Russian Novichok poisoning ever alleged to have occurred outside Russia will not now be subjected to cross-examination or to any form of forensic questioning that is the requirement of the English criminal law, nor to their physical appearance in court that is their fundamental right under the English legal doctrine of habeas corpus.
“I have concluded that neither Sergei nor Yulia Skripal will be called to give oral evidence,” Hughes has announced. “I have no doubt that the public exposure which would follow these witnesses being called would be intrusive and uncomfortable and would risk disrupting both their daily personal and family lives and those of people connected to them in many different ways…The overwhelming risk, which quite alters the position in the present case, is of physical attack on one or both of the Skripals. There is every reason to be satisfied that an attack similar to that which appears to have taken place in 2018 remains a real risk, either at the hands of persons with the same interest as the 2018 attackers, or via others interested in supporting the same supposed aim, if either Sergei or Yulia can be identified and their current whereabouts discovered.”
Hughes has come to judgement here — days before he commences what he calls open proceedings — on what the entire process of his inquiry has yet to substantiate in evidence and to decide. Hughes has ruled that the Russian state, through its agents, attacked and attempted to kill the Skripals, and aim to do so again if Hughes lets the Skripals appear before him in any form at all.
Verifiable evidence of what the Skripals themselves believe – if they are alive — is to be substantiated only by their police guards. It is this police and MI6 record – compiled in the absence of lawyers representing the Skripals — which Hughes has now ruled to accept in violation of all the British rules of the admissibility of evidence.
“Having considered the representations of those responsible for their present security,” Hughes has judged, “I am more than satisfied that it would simply not be possible to maintain proper security if either of them were to be called to give evidence. That would be so whether they gave evidence from an open witness box, or by means of some electronic link from a remote room. In either case their present integrated security arrangements could not be maintained consistently with the necessity of being brought to a suitable location which is itself secure and which has an electronic link which is immune to interception. Moreover, if they were to be seen, or their voices heard, there could be no proper control of the likelihood that people who may have dealings with them (however casual or innocent) would recognise them and that that recognition would become more widely known, whether through social or other media or otherwise.”
As Bumble said, “if the law says that, the law is a ass.”
Dickens’s town beadle had such a high sense of his own importance, he failed to notice when he was making an ass of himself, as well as of the law. Hughes hasn’t read the book.
Since the book of the Skripal case was first published in February 2020, the four-year sequel of British government attempts to prevent public disclosure of the evidence in their case, and in the case of the death of Dawn Sturgess, can be followed in the archive of the two coroners, David Ridley of Wiltshire and Baroness Heather Hallett of Whitehall.
The Hughes archive, now two and a half years long, can be read here.
There has been no evidence from Hughes, or his predecessors Ridley and Hallett, that they have direct personal knowledge that Sergei Skripal and Yulia Skripal are alive. Instead, in 2022 Hughes accepted unnotarized, unwitnessed papers from a lawyer named Adam Chapman appointed and paid by the Home Office to represent the Skripals. Chapman has refused to confirm his direct knowledge of the Skripals or of their purported instructions to him. He has said nothing of substance in the hearings Hughes has held to date.
In April 2022 Hughes was asked a series of questions to determine who arranged Chapman’s “representation” since Chapman himself refused to say. Hughes’s spokesman and adviser Martin Smith (right) was asked for Hughes: “how do you know the [representation] appointment was made directly by the Skripals and how has Lord Hughes verified the personal wish of Sergei Skripal and the personal wish of Yulia Skripal?”
For Hughes, Smith answered: “The Skripals’ application was received by the Inquiry from Kingsley Napley, whose conduct is regulated by the Solicitors Regulatory Authority (SRA). Solicitors such as Kingsley Napley have obligations to verify the identity of their clients (para 8.1 SRA Code of Conduct) and not to mislead the court or others (para 1.4 of the SRA Code of Conduct). Where a core participant or other person has appointed a qualified lawyer to act for them, the Chair is required by rule 6 of the Inquiry Rules 2006 to designate that lawyer as their recognised legal representative. The Inquiry has relied on an application submitted by regulated legal professionals in doing so. There is nothing unusual about this approach.” Read more.
Three months ago, on June 21, Chapman was replaced in Hughes’s court by a junior barrister named Jack Holborn. He told the judge the Skripals should not testify for themselves because “no security measures are perfect.” Holborn’s remarks in court were so brief, he omitted to say that he had been in direct contact with either Sergei or Yulia Skripal. In fact, Holborn has not. Asked to verify that he had made visual contact or that he has had any other form of communication with Sergei and Yulia Skripal, Holborn refused to say.
Left: the only book on the Skripal case not dictated by the British Government; centre, Adam Chapman, the solicitor paid by the British Government to represent the Skripals in the Hughes court; for background on Chapman, his legal assistants and his involvement in the case, read this. Right, Jack Holborn, the barrister paid by the British Government to represent the Skripals in the Hughes court; for more detail on Holborn, click to read.
The evidence, and absence of evidence, are that Hughes is running an investigation in which the prime witnesses are phantoms – there is no verification they are alive and mean what the judge and his lawyers say they mean.
Instead, in his September 23 ruling, Hughes claims: “Sergei and Yulia Skripal were extensively interviewed by police officers in 2018 not long after discharge from hospital. Written transcripts of those interviews have been disclosed.”
In addition to these still secret transcripts, Hughes says “I directed that those representing the [Sturgess] family prepare submissions detailing (having reviewed the interview transcripts) the factual queries that, at that stage at least, they would wish the Skripals to answer. Sergei and Yulia Skripal were then each sent a R9 request [Rule 9 of the Inquiry Rules 2006] inviting them to provide a further written statement. I did not consider it appropriate [sic] to include all the queries that had been raised in that request, but the great majority [sic] were. Draft statements have now been provided to the Inquiry.”
Source: https://dsiweb-prod.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/
Hughes implies but carefully avoids saying that he has verified these “draft statements” were replies directly from the Skripals; and if they were, how they were transmitted, by whom, where and when, and whether they were written in Russian or English.
According to Hughes, the Skripal “drafts” “will need to be security checked (and I will direct that that process is expedited) but I am confident that much [sic] of what they have said will be suitable to be adduced in OPEN session. If there are sections of the new statements that cannot be made OPEN, they will be available to me in CLOSED.”
“There is of course a clear advantage,” Hughes declared, “in the evidence of any witness being given orally and subject to instant exploration by way of questions”. The judge is here acknowledging the fundamental standard of the criminal law he was once seated on the High Court and Court of Appeal benches to enforce, only to abolish the standard for this case against Russia.
“That benefit,” Hughes referred to the courtroom standard for truth, “is significantly reduced now that the transcripts of long interviews with both Sergei and Yulia are available and have been disclosed, and both witnesses have provided further statements directly addressing specific questions raised by the family of Dawn Sturgess. I recognise that it remains possible that further factual queries could arise before or during the hearing, but I am not satisfied that such queries are likely to be of sufficient significance to outweigh the great dangers of requiring either or both of the Skripals to attend. I do not rule out the possibility of obtaining further written evidence from the Skripals in response to any such further queries, although that process is difficult and time-consuming and powerful reasons would have to be made out before I were to decide to require it.”
In short, the British Government’s case against Russia for chemical warfare attacks on British soil, and against Russian military agents charged with the attempted murder of the Skripals and Sturgess, rests now on transcripts of police interviews which have been vetted and edited; and on paper statements relayed between lawyers, police and other government agents.
Phantom witnesses, ghost-written papers.
