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130806 Sunday Business post Tape of alleged racial abuse is admissible in case By Kieron Wood
The Barristers Professional Conduct Tribunal has ruled that a recording of a phone call by a banister allegedly racially abusing his Romanian client is admissible in proceedings for professional misconduct. The Romanian, who cannot be named, complained in 2004 about a barrister after the lawyer was allegedly recorded telling his secretary that “scumbag Romanians” should be “put in a fucking ship and fucked the fuck out of this country altogether”. The Romanian man had been involved in family law proceedings involving his five- year-old daughter. He has since been deported, after serving two months of a two-year prison sentence for handling stolen property. The man’s wife, their daughter and his 17-year-old son stayed in Ireland. The Bar Council is investigating claims that the barrister, who was acting for the wife, divulged private information about him in a phone call to his secretary The woman tape-recorded the remarks. Family law cases are heard in private and nobody is allowed to reveal details of proceedings to third parties. The barrister allegedly told his secretary that Romanians should be “fucked out back where you came from and let flicking whoever is still in power in Romania sort you all out”. He was alleged to have said that Romanians were “on every fiddle that’s going”, and that they were as trustworthy as scorpions. The barrister’s counsel argued that the tape was inadmissible because it had been made without his consent, so was in breach of the Postal and Telecommunications Services Act 1983. He also claimed that it violated the barrister’s constitutional right to privacy and breathed the European Convention on Human Rights. But the tribunal ruled that the 1983 act had been amended by the Interception of Postal Packets and Telecommunications Messages (Regulation) Act 1993. Under that legislation, a telephone conversation can be legally recorded by one of the parties involved, without the other’s consent. Tribunal chairman John Gleeson SC said: “The fact that one party to a telephone conversation records it does not, in the opinion of the tribunal, give rise to a constitutional difficulty or a breach of the European Convention on Human Rights. “After all, a party to a telephone conversation is always capable of giving evidence of the contents of that conversation without any recording apparatus, whether by making a contemporaneous note or by simply recalling in evidence what was said during the conversation.” The hearing of the complaint will now go ahead in private at a future date. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Read the Acts!! -----------------------------------------------------Click here! Postal and Telecommunications Services Act 1983 Prohibition on interception of telecommunications messages.
Part 5 Section 98. —(1) A person who—