The European Court of Human Rights has dismissed - in a split decision – a case brought by two men who between them spent 24 years in prison but refused compensation by the justice secretary after their convictions were quashed. Lawyers involved in the case are now urging the next government to make the compensation scheme for miscarriages of justice fairer.

In Nealon and Hallam v the United Kingdom, the claimants argued the UK’s statutory scheme for compensation for miscarriages of justice was incompatible with the convention right of presumption of innocence because they were required to ‘prove’ their ‘innocence’ to be eligible for compensation. 

By a majority of 12 votes to 5, the Strasbourg court’s Grand Chamber ruled there was no violation.

The judgment states: ‘In reaching this conclusion, the court is not insensible to the potentially devastating impact of a wrongful conviction. However, its role is not to determine how states should translate into material terms the moral obligation they may owe to persons who have been wrongfully convicted. Rather, in the present case, it was tasked solely with determining on the facts before it whether there had been a breach of [the convention] due to the operation of a compensations scheme established domestically which was clearly conceived and operated in restrictive terms.’

The dissenting judges said the current system ‘operates in such a way that the test set by the legislation represents a hurdle which is virtually insurmountable’, noting that only 13 out of 346 applications between 2017 and 2022 for compensation following a wrongful conviction were granted.

Lawyers for the claimants are urging the next government ‘to accept the moral obligation society owes to people who, through no fault of their own, have been subject to a miscarriage of justice’.

Birnberg Peirce partner Marcia Willis Stewart KC (Hon), for Hallam, will ‘continue to bring pressure to bear on the government to amend the compensation scheme’ to enable her client and others to obtain financial redress.

Jordans Solicitors partner Mark Newby, for Nealon, urged the next government to review the plight of his client and others who have suffered a miscarriage of justice, ‘ensuring they are given proper support applying a revised test that delivers fairness’.

Legal thinktank Justice intervened in the case. Chief executive Fiona Rutherford said: ‘Scotland, Ireland, and almost all countries signed up to the [convention] have schemes that enable miscarriage of justice victims to gain rightful recognition that they should never have been convicted. It’s time the government urgently overhaul the compensation regime. Those wrongfully convicted and imprisoned should receive the recompense they are entitled to, in a humane, fair and timely way.’

Matt Foot, co-director of APPEAL, a charity that fights miscarriages of justice, said: 'We urgently need to find a mechanism to compensate those victims who have spent years in prison for crimes of which they are innocent, just as we need to compensate all the victims of the Post Office and infected blood scandals.'

 

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