cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/42547255
The top prosecutor for England and Wales has blamed an “evidential failure” for the collapse of a Chinese espionage case, raising questions of whether Whitehall officials backed away from labelling Beijing an “enemy”.
Stephen Parkinson, the director of public prosecutions [DPP], wrote on Thursday of his “disappointment and frustration” at the collapse of the trial of Christopher Berry, 33, and Chris Cash, 30, a former parliamentary researcher. Both men said they were entirely innocent and that the case, alleging the involvement of more than two dozen reports to Beijing intelligence, should never have been brought.
Parkinson linked the decision by prosecutors to offer no evidence against the pair with a requirement under the Official Secrets Act for information to have been collected and passed to an “enemy”.
This was a “limitation” that no longer existed in the National Security Act 2023, which replaced the Official Secrets Act and “under which any future offending will fall to be considered”, Parkinson said. He said prosecutors had correctly concluded there was sufficient evidence to prosecute when Cash and Berry were charged last April but that it now “no longer met the evidential test”.
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His comments prompted questions about whether Whitehall security officials had changed their assessment of the threat from China in the 17 months between the charges being made and the cases collapsing. The government has been accused of softening its approach to Beijing in the hope of improving their economic relationship.
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On Monday Philp had referred in the Commons to a case summary prepared for Berry and Cash’s initial court appearance in April last year. It detailed, Philp said, how a deputy national security adviser had provided a statement that assessed some of the information allegedly passed to a Chinese intelligence official to be “directly or indirectly, useful” to the Communist Party. The adviser’s assessment was that some material was “prejudicial to the safety or interests of the United Kingdom”, Philp said.
Writing again to Parkinson on Thursday, Philp said his intervention still left a “huge unanswered question”, adding: “How could the evidential test be met in April 2024 but not in September 2025? What changed?
“In particular, given the CPS press notice confirming that a deputy national security adviser gave key evidence prior to April 2024, did they or anyone else give any further evidence after that and, if so, did the further evidence undermine the categorisation of China as an ‘enemy’?”
Luke de Pulford, executive director of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, said: “Why did the CPS think they stood a reasonable chance of prosecution in 2024, knowing about the ‘enemy’ problem, and not in 2025?”
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This week the prime minister said he was disappointed the trial would not take place.
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Dropped China spying case raises red flags
… So sudden was the CPS’s flip that Tom Tugendhat, both security minister when the charges were laid last year and an MP Cash knew well, was abroad for the ensuing debate. But Alicia Kearns, a fellow MP also known closely to Cash, was there to pass on this intriguing claim: “[Tugendhat] was told by agency heads that the evidence was overwhelming and the case beyond doubt.” She added: “Counterterrorism police this morning agreed and said the same to me — that the evidential standard had been met at the time of charges”. And this: “Officials, the security services and the police agree that the case was a slam dunk." …
… There can be no question that the pair have not been found guilty but Westminster’s China circles are aswirl with rumours. Why was the case dropped? Who decided? What was the government’s role?
Of course, in a case involving espionage, it is always possible for the security services suddenly to discover that the court is requiring a level of disclosure they cannot comply with, for fear of giving away tradecraft or endangering active agents. But the government, while professing itself “extremely disappointed” and insisting it had no influence over the CPS, questioned the law …
The truth is that whatever the law says, no country can defend itself from predatory infiltration by another state unless its leaders are capable of recognising the threat and backing their security services to combat it. If instead, while its companies and laboratories are quietly stripped and its politicians are harassed and surveilled, the senior ranks of its civil service and cabinet prefer to waffle about taking a “balanced approach” and “weighing the trade-offs”, it doesn’t matter how many good laws you put on the books. As China knows better than anyone, actions speak louder than laws.