Janner’s ‘victims’ condemn CPS for delays to charges
ACCUSERS of the late Labour peer Lord Janner yesterday said the Crown Prosecution Service was unwilling to charge him over alleged sexual assaults ‘no matter what’.
Lawyers representing alleged victims detailed abuse spanning more than 25 years – despite pleas from the family of the former MP that the hearing ‘reverses the presumption of innocence’. The latest strand of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) will examine institutional responses to allegations of child abuse against Lord Janner dating back to the early 1960s.
Opening the remote proceedings, held over video link, counsel to the inquiry Brian Altman QC warned that it is ‘not an investigation into Lord Janner’s guilt or his innocence’. However, the hearing heard testimony from alleged victims, many of whom said they were abused in care homes in Leicestershire and did not immediately contact police because they felt ‘ fear, shame, embarrassment and confusion’.
Lord Janner, an MP in Leicester from 1970 to 1997 before his elevation to the House of Lords, was facing 22 charges of child sexual abuse against nine different boys at the time of his death in 2015. Aged 87 and suffering from Alzheimer’s, he was deemed too unwell to stand trial and was instead due to face a ‘trial of the facts’, but this was cancelled when he died.
Yesterday barrister William Campbell, acting on behalf of 13 alleged victims, accused the police and CPS of failing to act.
Mr Campbell said: ‘ Neither the police nor CPS followed where the evidence properly led. Someone, somewhere, had their thumb on the scales of justice.’
The inquiry will examine whether the police, CPS, Leicestershire County Council – which operated several children’s homes – and the Labour Party did enough to respond to allegations.
On behalf of the CPS, Edward
‘Thumb on the scales of justice’
Brown QC denied the body had been lobbied in any way relating to allegations against Lord Janner.
The proceedings took an unusual turn yesterday when barristers representing complainants embarked on a war of words with Lord Janner’s son, Daniel, days after he branded proceedings a ‘kangaroo court’.
Nick Stanage, representing 13 complainants, said Mr Janner, himself a QC, had ‘vilified and insulted’ the inquiry ‘in terms which bear little or no relation to reality’.
Mr Stanage said the Janner family had ‘friends in high places’ who ‘ have joined a campaign to stop the objective and systematic examination of the evidence’.