Part of Criminal Justice Bill – in a Public Bill Committee am 2:45 pm ar 11 Ionawr 2024.
Laura Farris
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Ministry of Justice and Home Office)
2:45,
11 Ionawr 2024
I was going to complete the point. If the hon. Lady will forgive me, I will do so before I give way again. We have to create Laws that apply equally to everybody in the United Kingdom. If we are to create an offence of sharing intimate images, we have to have a translation of intimacy that is absolutely irrefutable to anybody sending that image around. Even if they do not know the person in the image, it has to be absolutely clear to the sender that they are sending an intimate image. I have already made the point that it would not be immediately obvious to everyone in the United Kingdom that an image of a woman showing her hair was a humiliating image of her. It would not automatically be an intimate image even if the person sharing it knew that the woman in the image was Muslim, because some Muslim women do not wear headscarves.
The hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley described a very dark case. She mentioned the language of blackmail and honour-based violence. She intimated coercive control. My simple point is that in the circumstances she has identified, there are a host of serious criminal offences being committed in conjunction with the use of the intimate image. We would say, very respectfully, that we think that kind of crime belongs much more comprehensively within other offences.
A parliamentary bill is divided into sections called clauses.
Printed in the margin next to each clause is a brief explanatory `side-note' giving details of what the effect of the clause will be.
During the committee stage of a bill, MPs examine these clauses in detail and may introduce new clauses of their own or table amendments to the existing clauses.
When a bill becomes an Act of Parliament, clauses become known as sections.
To allow another Member to speak.
Laws are the rules by which a country is governed. Britain has a long history of law making and the laws of this country can be divided into three types:- 1) Statute Laws are the laws that have been made by Parliament. 2) Case Law is law that has been established from cases tried in the courts - the laws arise from test cases. The result of the test case creates a precedent on which future cases are judged. 3) Common Law is a part of English Law, which has not come from Parliament. It consists of rules of law which have developed from customs or judgements made in courts over hundreds of years. For example until 1861 Parliament had never passed a law saying that murder was an offence. From the earliest times courts had judged that murder was a crime so there was no need to make a law.
