ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: We’re now going to talk about cameras being allowed in courtrooms, should they be allowed there? Well from this week limited live broadcasts will begin in Appeals Courts in England and Wales. Proponents say it will help improve understanding of the legal process, critics say it could trivialise court hearings making them into a US media spectacle. I am joined now by the Shadow Attorney General, Emily Thornberry, very good to talk to you. I know you were listening with some degree of interest there to Lord Lawson and you may want to respond very quickly to what Lord Lawson was saying there about price freezes.

EMILY THORNBERRY: I think the public who listen to this will be thinking they are putting up so many arguments against a price freeze, it seems quite ridiculous. They think of anything, they are getting terribly desperate and they feel that the Prime Minister, I do, I feel that the Prime Minister is making it up as he goes along. He turns up at Prime Minister’s Questions and pulls another rabbit out of a hat but the fact of the matter is that yes, gas and petrol and non-renewables are cheap now but in the future they are going to run out and so obviously we have to invest. Can you imagine the public ever forgiving us as politicians if we don’t make provision for their kids and grandchildren in 20, 30, 40 years’ time. The truth of the matter is, Ed is right, have a price freeze now or when we get into government and then look again at the energy market and if the Tories think that the prices are going to go up in the meantime, in advance of a Labour government, you know, they could have a price freeze. They could do the same thing, they could introduce a price freeze and take a look at the market. All they are saying is get rid of green subsidies when they know the Liberals will never agree to it so they are basically doing nothing in the face of the difficulties we all have.

DM: Well Lord Lawson has left the studio so we can’t have that debate now so let me ask you about cameras in court. Is the Prime Minister then, and others in government, right about having trials about that? Will it shine a light, will it let the public know a lot more about the procedures that take place there?

EMILY THORNBERRY: I think people shouldn’t get over-excited by this, I think these are baby steps. So we have had the Supreme Court online anyway and people have been able to watch that for some time. It hasn’t really rivalled Eastenders, there haven’t been a large number of people watching it and this is really to introduce it to …

DM: But that is really very different, the Supreme Court. When we get into the Appeals Court and ultimately criminal trials, perhaps certain parts of it, would that work?

EMILY THORNBERRY: The Court of Appeal, all we’re doing at the moment is they are going to introduce cameras into the Court of Appeal when the Court of Appeal give a judgement. So for example on the Stuart Hall judgement that would have been on television and actually I think people would have been very interested to hear the reason behind why his sentence went up and why it only went up the amount it did. So I think that’s really good. The difficulty is that I think people are very nervous about having witnesses, victims, jurors on television and it think they are worried that whilst we are really in favour of open justice, we’re worried about it kind of being trivialised and being turned into entertainment. Listen, I watched the OJ Simpson like anybody did and it was entertaining but it wasn’t necessarily about justice.

DM: But don’t you think the provisions are there to take account of those concerns and there is a fundamental right of the public to watch these trials, they are open trials, you are allowed to go and sit in the public gallery. We are in the 21st century now and we have the technology to allow more people to see it.

EMILY THORNBERRY: I just think you have to be very concerned, and we are very concerned. If you are a witness or a victim of a horrible offence you have to be brave enough to appear in court and the idea of appearing on ITV as you give your evidence, or Sky, as you give your evidence, I think it is an additional pressure that we don’t want to tip over our justice system.

DM: There is another important part of it isn’t there? Because you see reported in the press after a judgement has been given, so many criticisms for instance of the sentencing or of something the judge has said. If you see it in context that kind of explains it at the point at which that sentence is delivered.

EMILY THORNBERRY: I think that’s why we are starting off with the Court of Appeal and why the Court of Appeal give the judgements that they do. It may be that if that works then we can move on to the lower courts but only in terms of what the judge says and not in terms of putting victims through even more than they currently have to go through.

DM: So we’ll see how that experiment goes. There is something else I wanted to ask you while you’re here with me now and that is the conundrum in that there seems to be an increased reporting of sexual assaults, child abuse and things like that but then ending up in court, there seem to be fewer and fewer cases following through to ultimate prosecution.

EMILY THORNBERRY: That’s right. I have had a number of charities, Rape Crisis and Women’s Aid, coming to see me and they were saying they were worried that police were dropping cases too early and so I looked into it and it does seem that 2010/2011 about half of the cases being reported to the Crown Prosecution Service and we had the Crown Prosecution Service saying last week they are going to do these cases better, which is great but the difficulty is… It is no longer half but they are only reporting a third, so the cases, only a third of them are being sent to the Crown Prosecution Service and we have to ask why that is.

DM: Well why do you think it is?

EMILY THORNBERRY: Well, the charities tell me that the police are dropping cases too early and they are only going for the really safe ones and that may be to do with the 20% cuts to the police because if they continue to be under pressure to get results it is much easier to prosecute a shoplifter than it is to prosecute some of these other cases which are definitely difficult and hard …

DM: But the police would outright deny that. They say they take them much more seriously than that.

EMILY THORNBERRY: Oh I know but all I can tell you is this is what the charities tell me, they tell me there is no further action taken on too many of these hard cases that could go to court and the evidence shows that there is fewer of them going to the Crown Prosecution Service so I think Theresa May needs to look at this and she needs to investigate why it is that fewer cases are going to the Crown Prosecution Service. We need to have a of leadership on this.

DM: Okay, Emily Thornberry, thank you very much indeed, very good to see you here.