Some extracts from the summary:
"The allegation made by the claimants is clear. It sets out a report from the Sunday Times dated 10 June 2007. The report states that:-It was, of course, Tony Blair who "intervened in the public interest" and to whose cheek the slap in that last sentence is directed.
"Bandar (Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz of al-Saud) went into Number 10 and said 'get it stopped' [words omitted]. Bandar suggested to Powell he knew the SFO were looking at the Swiss accounts?if they didn't stop it, the Typhoon contract was going to be stopped and intelligence and diplomatic relations would be pulled." ..."
"The Director, in his first witness statement, states that the reason why he discontinued the investigation was that to continue:-
"would risk an immediate cessation of co-operation in relation to national and international security which might have devastating effects on the UK's national security interest ? both locally in the UK and in the wider international field in the Middle East?a compelling case had been made out that the UK's national security and innocent lives would be put in serious jeopardy if the SFO's investigation continued." He says:-
"It was this feature of the case which I felt left me with no choice but to halt the investigation."
The defendant in name, although in reality the Government, contends that the Director was entitled to surrender to the threat. The law is powerless to resist the specific and, as it turns out, successful attempt by a foreign government to pervert the course of justice in the United Kingdom, by causing the investigation to be halted. The court must, so it is argued, accept that whilst the threats and their consequences are "a matter of regret", they are a "part of life".
So bleak a picture of the impotence of the law invites at least dismay, if not outrage. The danger of so heated a reaction is that it generates steam; this obscures the search for legal principle. The challenge, triggered by this application, is to identify a legal principle which may be deployed in defence of so blatant a threat. However abject the surrender to that threat, if there is no identifiable legal principle by which the threat may be resisted, then the court must itself acquiesce in the capitulation. ..."
"The principle we have identified is that submission to a threat is lawful only when it is demonstrated to a court that there was no alternative course open to the decision-maker. This principle seems to us to have two particular virtues.
Firstly, by restricting the circumstances in which submission may be endorsed as lawful, the rule of law may be protected. If one on whom the duty of independent decision is imposed may invoke a wide range of circumstances in which he may surrender his will to the dictates of another, the rule of law is undermined.
Secondly, as this case demonstrates, too ready a submission may give rise to the suspicion that the threat was not the real ground for the decision at all; rather it was a useful pretext. It is obvious, in the present case, that the decision to halt the investigation suited the objectives of the executive. Stopping the investigation avoided uncomfortable consequences, both commercial and diplomatic. Whilst we have accepted the evidence as to the grounds of this decision, in future cases, absent a principle of necessity, it would be all too tempting to use a threat as a ground for a convenient conclusion. We fear for the reputation of the administration of justice if it can be perverted by a threat. Let it be accepted, as the defendant's grounds assert, that this was an exceptional case; how does it look if on the one occasion in recent memory, a threat is made to the administration of justice, the law buckles?..."
"The court has a responsibility to secure the rule of law. The Director was required to satisfy the court that all that could reasonably be done had been done to resist the threat. He has failed to do so. He submitted too readily because he, like the executive, concentrated on the effects which were feared should the threat be carried out and not on how the threat might be resisted. No-one, whether within this country or outside is entitled to interfere with the course of our justice. It is the failure of Government and the defendant to bear that essential principle in mind that justifies the intervention of this court. We shall hear further argument as to the nature of such intervention. But we intervene in fulfilment of our responsibility to protect the independence of the Director and of our criminal justice system from threat. On 11 December 2006, the Prime Minister said that this was the clearest case for intervention in the public interest he had seen. We agree."
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