Pub bombs justice group snubbed in legal aid bid
LEGAL Aid bosses have snubbed Birmingham pub bomb justice campaigners, leaving their bid for a crunch judicial review over an inquest controversy hanging by a thread.
The Justice4the21 group representing ten pub bombings families must now raise £20,000 within days to pay for legal representation.
They want barristers to challenge Coroner Sir Peter Thornton’s decision to exclude the issue of the perpetrators from the scope of the new inquest into the 21 deaths.
Angry campaigners claim their bid has been thrown out while public funding has been made to the Coroner to defend his ruling.
Campaign spokeswoman Julie Hambleton said: “We have been informed this week that an application for legal aid to fund our judicial review challenge against The Ruling on Scope made by the Coroner for the Birmingham Pub Bombings Inquests 1974 has been refused.
“Our challenge is to argue against his decision to rule out of the investigation the issue of perpetrators – who made the bombs, who directed them, who carried them, who plant- ed them and their associates. We had raised over £15,000 from Crowd Justice to make the application to apply for permission to judicially review his ruling.
“We went to the Legal Aid Agency because a judge found that there was sufficient merit for the challenge to be heard before a panel of judges – the Legal Aid Agency appears not to think there is such merit or sufficient public interest to award public funding for such an important challenge.
“This is despite the public funding being made to the Coroner an others to defend his ruling.
“We are therefore now with our backs against the wall – again – with important deadlines to be met before the two-day hearing in December and urgently require £20,000 to continue to fund our legal representation so we can argue our case at its highest.”
December 6 and 7 had been aside for the High Court hearing.
When Sir Peter Thornton made his announcement he said it was “not in the public interest for these investigations, and inquests to pursue unachievable, or indeed unlawful objectives.”
Ten of the families responded by saying unless the issue of the bombers was investigated there was little point in the inquests going ahead. set