Three weeks of partially closed hearings into the way police, prosecutors, local government and the Labour party dealt with child sexual abuse allegations involving the late Lord Janner will start on Monday.
In order to protect the identities of those who allege they were assaulted by the former Leicester West MP, most of the evidence sessions will not be live-streamed to the public.
The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) is already carrying out all of its work remotely because of the coronavirus pandemic. Short summaries of the hearings will be published.
Some journalists are being allowed to watch proceedings, but anonymity requirements preventing identification of complainants will restrict what can be reported.
Greville Janner QC represented Leicester West for Labour between 1970 and 1997. He was later given a peerage, becoming Lord Janner of Braunstone.
At the time of his death in December 2015, at the age of 87, he was facing 22 charges of child sexual abuse, relating to nine different boys, but had been deemed to be too ill to stand trial. He had consistently denied the allegations.
In his absence, a trial of the facts was scheduled but it was cancelled when he died. A report the following year by the retired judge Sir Richard Henriques concluded that the Crown Prosecution Service had missed three opportunities to prosecute Janner for indecent assault and, as it then was, buggery.
There have been a number of police investigations into Janner’s alleged activities in 1991, 2002 and 2006.
The inquiry will examine whether his “public prominence led to deferential treatment” from institutions including Leicestershire Police, the CPS, Leicestershire county council and the Labour party.
Daniel Janner QC, Lord Janner’s son, who is not a core participant at the inquiry, has opposed the hearings. In a series of tweets in the run-up to the hearings, he condemned the “Kafkaesque IICSA show trial of my late father”.
Announcing her decision in March to go ahead with the Janner hearings under such restrictive conditions, the chair of IICSA, Prof Alexis Jay said: “This is not an investigation into Lord Janner’s guilt or innocence. It is not a proxy criminal or civil trial.
“It is an investigation into institutions, and into how they responded to the allegations made against Lord Janner. Among the questions the Investigation will seek to answer are whether those institutions gave Lord Janner preferential treatment, and if so why. “
In that preliminary ruling, Jay revealed that lawyers advising the inquiry recommended that the substantially closed hearing should not go ahead. They had argued that a closed hearing “risked offending the fundamental principle of open justice [and] closed hearings may not allay public concern and could create considerable public unease”.
Jay concluded that the inquiry strand should go ahead, stating that her main reason was that “there remain, in my view, too many unanswered questions about institutional responses to the allegations made against Lord Janner.
“Those allegations were extremely serious, and they span a period of decades. For most, and perhaps all, of the complainant core participants, this investigation represents the last opportunity to get answers to those questions.”
