Official Secrets case dropped
A civil servant accused of damaging the government by breaking the Official Secrets Act has seen the case against him abandoned by prosecutors.
Derek Pasquill, 48, waited 20 months before his case came to trial at the Old Bailey, only to see prosecutors abandon their allegations.
He had allegedly released materials on the government’s treatment of radical Islamists and its supposed knowledge of extraordinary rendition.
The New Statesman and Observer newspapers published stories based on the documents prosecutors claimed he had leaked.
But on day one of the trial they told the Old Bailey the Foreign Office had provided them with information showing the leaked documents had not damaged the government.
A statement from the crown prosecution service said: “The material in question indicates some discussion within the FCO as to the likely damage caused by the defendant’s disclosures, which the prosecution considers undermines the subsequent settled opinion of the served FCO witness that damage has been caused.”
New Statesman editor John Kampfner described the dropping of all six charges against Mr Pasquill as a “great victory for free speech”.
“This was a misguided and malicious prosecution, particularly given that a number of government ministers privately acknowledged from the outset that the information provided to us by Derek Pasquill has been in the public interest and was responsible in large part for changing government policy for the good in terms of extraordinary rendition and policy towards radical Islam,” he commented.
Defence lawyer Julian Knowles said the stress brought on by the 20-month Special Branch investigation could have been avoided.
The case was not the first to have involved Britain’s relationship with the US under the Official Secrets Act. In May last year a former civil servant and political researcher received jail sentences for leaking a memo detailing talks between the two countries on the Iraq war in 2004.
