Crown prosecution service

Lord Hermer, the Attorney General, has often been criticised during his two years in the role. For his decision to authorise Lucy Connolly’s prosecution, his angry denials that two-tier justice exists, his ‘fanatical devotion to international law’, being ‘dangerously wrong about the ECHR’, an apparent dislike for the British state and its soldiers, and for ludicrous hyperbole such as when he claimed that critics of the ECHR want migrants to drown. It’s been easy to picture him as a sinister figure, using domestic and international law to serve his politics rather than the interests of his people.

The Crown Prosecution Service’s latest grim statistics show that, despite the increasing number of police recorded rapes over the past five years, the prosecution rate has reduced. This state of affairs, has been branded as the 'decriminalisation of rape' by the Victim’s Commissioner Dame Vera Baird QC. And the data's fine print also reveals a heart-breaking truth: the victims suffering from the worst outcomes are children. Just 16 per cent of victims aged 10-13 saw their abuser charged for the abuse they inflicted, with 55 per cent then seeing no prosecution take place. By contrast, the charge rate in the 25-59 victim bracket was 46 per cent, while the no prosecution rate was 30 per cent.