Why are we waiting for Lady Macur’s Review into child sex abuse in North Wales?

CROSS POSTED ON BYLINE.COM

Why does a judge having meticulously completed a major report on failings in investigating historic child sexual abuse in North Wales want to redact her own findings?

This is the bizarre  question facing  Lady  Justice Macur who on December 15 last year handed in her final independent report to the Welsh Office and the Ministry of Justice. Yet only weeks later Caroline Dinenage, the junior minister at Ministry of Justice, told Ann Clwyd, Labour MP for Cynon Valley, that the judge herself was recommending ” certain material  should be considered for redaction”.

She also disclosed that ” the report needs to be considered by law enforcement agencies and the government before it can be published. This includes considering whether redactions need to be  made”.

At the moment there is no date for publication – rather like the situation until last month surrounding  Dame Janet’s Smith’s report into Savile at the BBC which had been delayed for more than a year after being completed.

The report is particularly significant for survivors of child sexual and physical abuse in North Wales children’s homes. An inquiry  by Sir Ronald Waterhouse into the abuse of children in care in the former Gwynedd and Clwyd council areas of North Wales between 1974 and 1996 was supposed to get to the root of the problem and see perpetrators jailed.

But it is now obvious some 20 years later that it failed to do so as Operation Pallial under the National Crime Agency has brought many perpetrators to the courts where they have either been found guilty and imprisoned or not guilty and allowed to continue with their lives.

The review will examine some very important questions. Was the scope of the first review adequate or did the terms of reference allow people to escape justice? Did the North Wales police do an adequate job investigating these crimes? How did some people get away with abuse? What do the police, the authorities and the government need to do to prevent such a repetition?

Yet at least two Welsh MPs Ann Clwyd and Wrexham MP Ian Lucas are far from happy about the fresh delay – the inquiry was started four years ago.

Ann Clwyd is particularly sceptical as to why the government needs to scrutinise the report before it is published.

She points out in a letter to Caroline Dinenage that it is meant to be independent of government but now the government will decide when it will be published and what will be published.

She wants to know whether the government and law enforcement agencies have been set deadlines and who will take the decision to redact what material and why.

It may be with Operation Pallial still to bring some cases to court notably the trial of ex  North Wales police chief Gordon Angelsea whose case is not due to start until  September that some material may not be published to avoid prejudicing the trial.

However none of this has been made clear. The Wales Office and the Ministry of Justice need to get on with this – set a date for publication – or suspicions will grow that both departments have something to hide. They owe this to the survivors of these appalling cases in children’s homes in North Wales.

 

 

24 thoughts on “Why are we waiting for Lady Macur’s Review into child sex abuse in North Wales?

  1. “the report needs to be considered by law enforcement agencies and the government before it can be published”

    Unlike most of what Exaro put out there

    Like

  2. I expected Laverty to comment.

    Aren’t you regarded as the BS General by the same operation, Mr Laverty? Hilarious of you to question anyone else’s credibility or integrity.

    I understand researchers working for at least 2 of the daily’s currently discrediting the CSA Scandal have been given their own copy of The Secret of Bryn Estyn to review.

    You never know, your own lies might feature heavily in any future articles on the NW Abuse Scandal which will be triggered following the release of this report.

    You can then proceed to whine on twitter like those you currently attack do, when you’re publicly named and shamed as yet another fantasist that lied because he wanted some compensation.

    £1,000,000 wasn’t it? LOL

    Like

    • If you put your name to your words you might gain at least some credibility. Maybe David might share your e-mail with me and we could do this on a one to one basis. As for Websters book………………………….so yesterday.

      Like

      • Fair enough. I won’t hold my breath. Anons tend to want to remain anon. It helps them with their narcissism.

        Like

      • The reason that most people wish to remain anonymous is because they have no wish to be harassed and bullied and defamed and threatened and subjected to stalking by Dr Death and his band of equally deranged and obsessive online cohorts.

        I believe that there were a number of threats to burn down a number of properties with the occupants still inside that were issued the last time somebody pulled up Dr Death on his endless lies.

        After his invitation to ‘visit’ and meet somebody ‘face to face’ was turned down as being a bit creepy and weird to consider of course

        Like

      • I suspect he only wants the email address and/or a name to report it to the police.

        He’s a serial complainant. Grow vegetables? Expect a visit. Laugh at his 18th century Hygiene? He’s down the police station quicker than a professional victim. Oh, wait…

        P.S. Try not to expect too much action from reporting me, Sir Mickey Mouse. Maybe a LOL when they read your email out in the office, if they haven’t set a forwarder up to automatically bin any of your future complaints that is.

        Like

  3. ‘Law enforcement agencies and the government’? What does she mean? Police,Parliament or people and groups on the periphery. This report needs to be released asap to Parliament without any redactions or the conspiracy loons on the ill informed fringe will be up all night on their PC’s.

    Like

    • Justice Waterhouse died on the 11th of May 2011.

      He had probably topped himself after having had a complete gutful of Dr Laverty stalking him since 1999 lol

      Like

      • “You’re Anon so have no credibility.”

        There are One Million reasons people LOL at him, 1,000,001 now Op Pal have gone on record as saying he is nothing but a BSer.

        Apparently not a word he says can be believed. Especially when it comes to what he ‘witnessed’. is it to do with the name Darren I wonder? 2 in a matter of months.

        I’m sure he will retort with “My credibility is unscathed”, tell that to any journalist who hears your name then cringes. Billy Bullshitter.

        Like

  4. According to his Twitter Darren Laverty has claimed he has reported the comments on this blog to the police. He ignores the fact he has been stalking and harrassing Esther Baker and other CSA survivors for months online he is still trying to claim he is the victim. That’s a story for Exaro to cover I am sure

    Like

    • Naturally.

      Any chance to be the “victim” he is on like a tart on a….

      Since nothing written above is offensive, menacing or even abusive, just pointing out his propensity to play the victim – which by reporting the comments he has proven – I hope they remind him that wasting police employment is a criminal offence.

      Like

  5. I shouldn’t laugh, however Mr Laverty is alleging my comment above – which is the opinion of a 3rd party, with no connection to this ‘defendant’ – is the defendant “harassing him”.

    Mr Laverty, remove your head from the pity bag for a second, and ask “why did ………. expect me to comment?”

    Anyone reading your timeline can see that you have an obsession with anything Exaro related. If commenting on your obsession is harassment, then what the bloody hell are you guilty of?

    Did a blog you contribute to not yesterday point out that Mr Hencke is friends with Graham Wilmer on facebook? Have you not spent weeks attempting to get the same Wilmer stripped of his MBE?

    I could go on and on. I doubt Mr Hencke’s readers want to see your nonsense so I’ll stop there.

    Mr Laverty – do send this in too. It will fit nicely in your folder alongside your claims that the defendant is responsible for Zika, Storm Imogen is his fault because he left his heating on in summer above 15C, and that he is really Lord Lucan.

    If that fails to lead to new charges, you could claim the defendant is here illegally? Syrian? Kurdish? Iraqi? Then you can claim he’s probably a member of ISIS too!

    If there was a victim version of Walter Mitty he should be called Darren Laverty.

    Like

  6. Sorry about my earlier posting re. Waterhouse, anybody would think I was a Daily Mail hack with that sort of mistake. I meant to say Sir William Utting, last look he was alive and well. I hope I got this one right otherwise I will be offered Jellicoe’s job at the Mail on Sunday.

    Like

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.