The Labour MP Jess Phillips has said she hopes the UK’s highest court “sees sense” and overturns a ruling preventing a domestic abuse survivor from suing Sussex police and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) for disclosing her address to her violent ex-partner. Phillips said that if the supreme court upheld the court of appeal’s decision when it hears the case on Wednesday and Thursday, it would prevent police from being held accountable for failures in cases of violence against women and girls. The address of the woman, anonymised as XGY in court proceedings, was disclosed by a CPS lawyer during a magistrates hearing in which a condition was sought preventing her former partner, who was accused of raping her and threatening to kill and throw acid on her, from entering the road where she was living.
Sussex police had not marked the address as confidential when sending it to the CPS. The woman moved home as a result of the disclosure. Witnesses and lawyers in court traditionally have what is known as “core immunity”.
Ruling last year that XGY could not sue Sussex police and the CPS, the court of appeal said this immunity applied beyond evidential matters and also to a broad range of police activity, including matters outside the courtroom relating to an investigation. Phillips, a former minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, said: “Hopefully the supreme court will see sense. I’ve been part of many different cases, where both the police and the CPS, have been held accountable in civil remedy, regarding their failures.
Often these cases where there’s been failures lead to longer-term change for victims of domestic abuse and sexual violence, like police failures within the grooming cases for example – charging women with crimes rather than helping them as victims. She said if there was one agency that had improved its approach to violence against women over the past 20 years it was the police but described the court of appeal ruling as “chilling”, adding: “I don’t think it helps the police or the CPS. I don’t think the idea that they can’t be held accountable is something that they need at the moment or should want because there’s a real problem with how victims of domestic abuse perceive the police.
So I don’t want to see a sort of really wide-ranging exemption for police to be held accountable with civil action.” XGY said: “More than six years later, I’m still living with the impact of what happened and the loss of the security I thought I’d finally found. If that trust is broken, there should be accountability.” The CPS and Sussex police were approached for comment.
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