Scott Report
Encyclopedia
The Scott Report was a judicial inquiry commissioned in 1992 after reports of arms sales
Arms-to-Iraq
The Arms-to-Iraq affair concerned the uncovering of the government-endorsed sale of arms by British companies to Iraq, then under the rule of Saddam Hussein...

 in the 1980s to Iraq
Iraq
Iraq ; officially the Republic of Iraq is a country in Western Asia spanning most of the northwestern end of the Zagros mountain range, the eastern part of the Syrian Desert and the northern part of the Arabian Desert....

 by British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 companies surfaced. The report was conducted by Sir Richard Scott
Richard Scott, Baron Scott of Foscote
Richard Rashleigh Folliott Scott, Baron Scott of Foscote PC, QC , is a British judge, who formerly held the office of Lord of Appeal in Ordinary.-Early life:...

, then a Lord Justice of Appeal
Lord Justice of Appeal
A Lord Justice of Appeal is an ordinary judge of the Court of Appeal of England and Wales, the court that hears appeals from the High Court of Justice, and represents the second highest level of judge in the courts of England and Wales-Appointment:...

. It was published in 1996. Much of the report was secret.

Background

In the late 1980s, Matrix Churchill, a British (Coventry
Coventry
Coventry is a city and metropolitan borough in the county of West Midlands in England. Coventry is the 9th largest city in England and the 11th largest in the United Kingdom. It is also the second largest city in the English Midlands, after Birmingham, with a population of 300,848, although...

) aerospace quality machine tools manufacturer, that had been bought by the Iraqi government, and was exporting machines used in weapons manufacture to Iraq. According to the International Atomic Energy Authority, its products later found in Iraq, were among the highest quality of their kind in the world. They were 'dual use' machines that 'could' be used to manufacture weapons parts. Such exports are subject to government control, and Matrix Churchill had the appropriate government permissions, following a 1988 relaxation of export controls. Crucially, however, this relaxation had not been announced to parliament - indeed, when asked in parliament whether controls had been relaxed, the then Secretary of State for Trade and Industry replied incorrectly that they had not.

Matrix Churchill was contacted by HM Customs and Excise, under suspicion of exporting arms components to Iraq without permission. It had this permission but this was denied by the government, in line with the most recently announced policy on the matter. Matrix Churchill's directors were therefore prosecuted in 1991 by Customs and Excise for breaching export controls.

The trial did not go well for the government - public interest immunity
Public Interest Immunity
Public-interest immunity is a principle of English common law under which the English courts can grant a court order allowing one litigant to refrain from disclosing evidence to the other litigants where disclosure would be damaging to the public interest...

 certificates obtained by the government to suppress some critical evidence (supposedly on grounds of national security) were quickly overturned by the trial judge, forcing the documents to be handed over to the defence. The trial eventually collapsed when former minister Alan Clark
Alan Clark
Alan Kenneth Mackenzie Clark was a British Conservative MP and diarist. He served as a junior minister in Margaret Thatcher's governments at the Departments of Employment, Trade, and Defence, and became a privy counsellor in 1991...

 admitted he had been 'economical with the actualité' in answer to parliamentary questions over export licenses to Iraq.

The Report

The Scott Report represents possibly the most exhaustive study produced to that date of the individual responsibility of ministers to Parliament. Scott comments on the difficulty of extracting from departments the required documents (some 130,000 of them in all) and notes how Customs and Excise could not find out what Ministry of Defence export policy was, and how intelligence reports were not passed on to those who needed to know. The Economist commented that "Sir Richard exposed an excessively secretive government machine, riddled with incompetence, slippery with the truth and willing to mislead Parliament". The report characterised the nature of the government as:
Scott identified three main areas of democratic concern. First, the Import, Export and Customs Powers (Defence) Act 1939 was emergency legislation passed at the outbreak of the Second World War. It allowed the government to issue regulations which were not subject to resolutions in Parliament, for the duration of the emergency, which would make it a criminal offence to export particular goods to particular countries. While the Act should have been lapsed in 1945, it remained in force, and had been modified in 1990 so as to become part of the Import and Export Control Act 1990. http://www.opsi.gov.uk/ACTS/acts1990/Ukpga_19900045_en_1.htm

The second area was the failure of ministerial accountability; the principle that "for every action of a servant of the crown a minister is answerable to Parliament".

The third area was that of Public Interest Immunity
Public Interest Immunity
Public-interest immunity is a principle of English common law under which the English courts can grant a court order allowing one litigant to refrain from disclosing evidence to the other litigants where disclosure would be damaging to the public interest...

 certificates, which had been issued during the Matrix Churchill trial. As a result of these certificates, innocent men were in danger of being sent to prison, because the government would not allow the defence counsel to see the documents that would exonerate their clients. While some of these contained potentially sensitive intelligence material, many were simply internal communications: the certificates were intended to protect the Ministers and civil servants who had written the communications, rather than the public interest. Scott states:

Publication

The publication of the report was seen by many as the nadir of the 1990s Conservative
Conservative Party (UK)
The Conservative Party, formally the Conservative and Unionist Party, is a centre-right political party in the United Kingdom that adheres to the philosophies of conservatism and British unionism. It is the largest political party in the UK, and is currently the largest single party in the House...

 governments of the UK. Prior to the report's publication, those ministers who were criticised were given the opportunity to comment and request revisions. The 1,806 page report was published, along with a press pack which included a few relatively positive extracts from the report presented as if representative of the entire report, at 3:30pm. Given a then largely pro-government press, this proved effective at stalling an extensive analysis in the media.

The report had to be debated in parliament. Ministers criticised in the report were given advanced access to the report and briefed extensively on how to defend themselves against the report's criticisms. In contrast, according to senior Labour MP Robin Cook
Robin Cook
Robert Finlayson Cook was a British Labour Party politician, who was the Member of Parliament for Livingston from 1983 until his death, and notably served in the Cabinet as Foreign Secretary from 1997 to 2001....

, the opposition were given just two hours to read the million-plus words, during which scrutiny they were supervised and prevented from making copies of the report. Finally, the Prime Minister, John Major
John Major
Sir John Major, is a British Conservative politician, who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1990–1997...

, stated that a vote against the Government would be in effect a vote of no confidence, ensuring that Conservative MPs would not vote against, while a vote for was a vote exonerating the Government of any wrongdoing. Robin Cook worked with a team of researchers to scrutinise the report, and delivered "what was regarded as a bravura performance". http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4127676.stm Nonetheless, the Government won the vote 320-319.
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