Tamlyn Edmonds of Edmonds Marshall McMahon was yesterday featured in The Law Gazette under the article Private prosecutions: a valuable safeguard.
Tamlyn explains the history of the private prosecution and how it is of constitutional importance. That whilst the need to pursue a private prosecution has diminished since the creation of the CPS, it has been described by Lord Wilberforce in Gouret v Union of Post Officer Workers 1975 as being ‘a valuable constitutional safeguard against inertia or partiality on the part of authority.’
Private prosecutions are on the rise, in part due to the enormous cutbacks faced by the police and other enforcement agencies and thus no longer have the resources to investigate and prosecute certain types of crime.
