Juvenile Offenders in UK Law

However, the international obligations which the United Kingdom has undertaken are also taken into account in our domestic law insofar as they inform the interpretation and application of the rights contained in the European Convention, which are now rights in UK domestic law.

"Having given proper consideration to the question, the Minister did not consider that a full public inquiry would be the best or most appropriate response. The main reason given by the coroner for recommending a public inquiry was to enable the sentencing issue to be considered. Clearly, a public inquiry would not be as well placed as the Sentencing Guidelines Council to review sentencing issues.

I accept Mr Garnham's submission that the domestic authorities of Amin, Middleton and the European authorities of Jordan and Taylor support the proposition that inquests are the normal method, absent some quite exceptional set of circumstances, of the State discharging its investigative obligation under Article 2 where there has been a death of a prisoner, whether adult or juvenile, in custody.

An inquest is the normal method by which the State discharges its Article 2 investigative obligation save where a criminal prosecution intervenes or a public inquiry is ordered in a major accident. In the instant case there was a full and thorough Inquest conducted with Middleton well in mind. The State, in my judgment, has discharged its Article 2 obligation in the instant case. Sentencing policy and funding for the juvenile estate were outwith its investigative obligations under Article 2.

However, it is clear from the Court's decision in Welch v United Kingdom (1995) 20 EHRR 247 that article 7 is not limited to the sentences prescribed by the law which creates the offence. It can also apply to additional penalties applied to that offence by other legislation. The concept of a penalty is an autonomous Convention concept.

How then do these authorities assist in the taxonomy of the present case? First, it is important to keep in mind that the words used in section 18 of the 1981 Act are "criminal cause or matter" and not, say, "criminal proceedings". Thirdly, it is necessary to have regard to the inherent nature and consequences of a caution. As Schiemann LJ said in R v Commissioner of Police of theMetropolis ex parte Thompson [1997] 1 WLR 1519 (at page 1520):

That is so, as the court explained in MM, because of the cumulative effect of the failure to draw any distinction on the basis of the nature of the offence, the disposal in the case, the time which has elapsed since the offence took place or the relevance of the data to the employment sought, and the absence of any mechanism for independent review of a decision to disclose data under section 113A.