By John Helmer, the longest continuously serving foreign correspondent in Russia, and the only western journalist to direct his own bureau independent of single national or commercial ties. Helmer has also been a professor of political science, and an advisor to government heads in Greece, the United States, and Asia. He is the first and only member of a US presidential administration (Jimmy Carter) to establish himself in Russia. Originally published at Dances with Bears.<\/p>\n
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A new lawyer appeared in a London court on Friday claiming to represent Sergei (lead image, left)\u00a0 and Yulia Skripal. Jack Holborn, a barrister specializing in what he calls human rights, \u00a0told Lord Anthony Hughes, who is conducting a public inquiry into the alleged Novichok death of Dawn Sturgess in 2018, that the Skripals should not be called to give evidence or testify in the case.<\/p>\n
Holborn claimed the Skripals are fearful for their security. \u201cNo security measures are perfect\u201d, he said.<\/p>\n
Holborn has not been in contact with the Skripals, however. He refuses to answer questions put to him on what visual contact or other communications he has had with either Sergei or Yulia Skripal.<\/p>\n
Instead, he was told what to say at the hearing by the law firm of Kingsley Napley which the British government is paying to show that the Skripals are participating in the Novichok case.<\/p>\n
The spokesman for Hughes and the inquiry was asked to explain Holborn\u2019s presence in court for the first time on Friday. She was also asked what authority the Skripals had given Holborn to represent them. The spokesman answered: \u201cKingsley Napley has been designated as the recognised legal representative of the Skripals under r[ule] 6 of the Inquiry Rules 2006. \u00a0By rule 8, the recognised legal representative may appoint a team to \u00a0assist them and Kingsley Napley have accordingly instructed counsel to appear on their clients\u2019 behalf.\u201d<\/p>\n
In other words, there has been no contact between the lawyers who say they represent the Skripals, and the Skripals themselves. The judge and government are refusing to give evidence that Sergei Skripal is alive, \u00a0and that Yulia Skripal is not in prison.<\/p>\n
The problem for the British Government is that if the Skripals are allowed to give live evidence at the Hughes inquiry, there is no telling what they may say to contradict or discredit the six-year official narrative of the Russian Novichok attack in England.<\/p>\n
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For the transcript of the three-hour hearing in the High Court on June 21, click to read. \u00a0\u00a0For the archive of the Hughes inquiry, including earlier hearings and submissions, click on the website. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Another preliminary hearing is likely in September before the open hearings commence on the scheduled date of October 28.<\/p>\n
The lawyer for the inquiry, Andrew O\u2019Connor KC, told Hughes on Friday morning this was a \u201cdifficult question as to whether either or both of Sergei and Julia Skripal should give oral evidence.\u201d He also acknowledged there was the same problem in revealing what the Skripals have already said. \u201cIn the case of the Skripals, the transcripts of their police interviews have not yet been provided to CPs [Core Participants] but will be very shortly.\u201d<\/p>\n
In fact, the Skripal transcripts will be so redacted, the officials and lawyers admitted in court, it is uncertain what the Skripals believe had happened to them, and why. Release of the redacted Skripal transcripts from March of 2018 risks being contradicted by fresh written statements to the Hughes inquiry from the Skripals, so that form of testimony is also being barred.<\/p>\n
Since March 4, 2018, when the Skripals slumped unconscious on a Salisbury town bench and were kept in hospital under police guard, three British prime ministers \u2014 Theresa May, Boris Johnson, and Rishi Sunak \u00a0\u2014 have continued the story that three Russian military officers attacked the Skripals with a Novichok nerve agent they had brought by plane into England, and sprayed on to the door handle of Sergei Skripal\u2019s home; that was several hours before he and his daughter showed symptoms and collapsed.<\/p>\n
The British have presented no evidence of Novichok on the Skripal home door handle; in the blood, skin, and urine testing of the Skripals in hospital; or in subsequent inquest and court proceedings.<\/p>\n
The alleged Russian attack weapon \u2013 a perfume bottle atomiser \u2013 did not materialize for months until July 2018, when police claim to have found it on a kitchen bench in the home of another alleged victim, Dawn Sturgess, ten days \u2013 repeat ten days\u00a0\u2014 \u00a0after exhaustive police searches of the house had failed to find it. The last Sturgess case report, dated in March when Hughes held his previous preliminary court session, can be read here.<\/p>\n
Sergei Skripal has not been seen in public since the day of the alleged Novichok attack, March 4, 2018. He has not been heard on the telephone by family members in Russia since June 26, 2019. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Yulia Skripal was last seen in a government-directed interview at a US bomber base \u00a0in England in May 2018; \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0her last telephone call to Russia was heard on November 20, 2020. \u00a0The Skripals have not been seen or heard from since.<\/p>\n
The full story of what happened and didn\u2019t happen, and of the coroners court and High Court hearings which have followed since 2018, has been documented in the book published in 2020; \u00a0then in reports of the ongoing cover-up by a retired Appeal Court judge, Lord Hughes.<\/p>\n
Adam Chapman, a solicitor at the Kingsley Napley firm, had said nothing during the Hughes proceeding which preceded the June 21 session; read for details here.<\/p>\n
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Lawyers for the government (left to right): Jack Holborn, barrister for the Skripals instructed by Adam Chapman (centre), a solicitor paid by the government to represent the Skripals; and Cathryn McGahey KC, the barrister for the Hone Office and intelligence and security services, MI6 and MI5. \u00a0Holborn describes himself as the \u201cgo-to junior for various government departments and private clients\u201d. He \u00a0has been vetted by the government for work on the Attorney-General\u2019s panels. These are \u201c400 junior counsel who undertake civil and EU work for all government departments.\u201d<\/p>\n
The discussion of the Skripals was opened on Friday by Michael Mansfield KC. He represents the Sturgess family and is seeking a multi-million pound payment from the government, alleging it failed to protect Sturgess from the Russian attack. \u201cThe fact is,\u201d he told the judge on Friday, \u201cthat both the Skripals were interviewed extensively at separate times in the same month [March-April 2018]. \u00a0We don\u2019t have any of the interviews. \u00a0It makes it very difficult to \u2014 well, you can see where it\u2019s going. \u00a0So we don\u2019t have any of the interviews.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mansfield meant to include interviews of the Skripals by the police, as well as by the secret services, MI6 and MI5.<\/p>\n
Lord Hughes avoided the MI6 interviews. Referring only to the police, he asked \u201cWhat about the interviews with the Skripals: why haven\u2019t they been disclosed yet?\u201d Replying for the Home Office and the secret services, Cathryn McGahey KC was evasive. The texts have gone for \u201cchecking\u201d, she said. \u00a0Hughes\u2019s question \u201chas to go to the Skripals\u2019 representatives and to the police and to your team,\u201d McGahey added.<\/p>\n
Hughes replied that he accepts that state secrecy must cover much of what the Skripals reportedly said in their interviews in 2018. He omitted to ask if the Skripals have said anything on the record in the intervening six years when the Russian Embassy in London has repeatedly requested consular access to its nationals, and been refused.<\/p>\n
\u201cGiven the surrounding circumstances of the Skripals,\u201d Hughes said in court on Friday, \u201cthere is quite a lot of material that\u2019s subject to a restriction order, but we know what that is.\u201d What is left which isn\u2019t classified, the judge added: \u201cI want to know, please [sic], from in fact both those parties and you, Mr O\u2019Connor [lawyer for the inquiry], a similar deadline for the service of the \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0duly redacted Skripal interviews.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mansfield for the Sturgess family then said he wants to know what the Skripals have said which might benefit the family\u2019s claim that the British government had been negligent in protecting Sturgess from the Novichok when the alleged Russian attackers had been under close surveillance from their arrival in the UK.<\/p>\n
Mansfield claimed he wants to know what the Skripals have said about the time leading up to the alleged attack on March 4, 2018, and the record of surveillance around Sergei Skripal\u2019s government-supplied safe house, as well as his \u00a0own security records. \u201cSo the weekend itself, and of course ending up with the door and the door handle. Then the final stage is, we say \u2014 which is important, and perhaps it comes before those two stages \u2014 and that is preventability. \u00a0We say there are a lot of questions that arise out of that.\u201d<\/p>\n
The police interviews with the Skripals have not been identified in court with dates or locations. Although they were officially represented by a lawyer in London for a High Court hearing on whether blood testing might be carried out when they were reportedly unconscious in hospital, \u00a0Mansfield doesn\u2019t say if the Skripals were represented by a lawyer when they were being interviewed. He carefully avoided mention of interviews with the Skripals which have been carried out by other government agencies, including MI6 and MI5.<\/p>\n
Mansfield reassured the judge and the government\u2019s lawyers in court that he wants to do no more than cherry-pick the Skripal interviews with the police. He doesn\u2019t want them to face cross-examination in the open inquiry, which is scheduled to start on October 28. \u00a0\u201cBesides the security aspect, they [the Sturgess family] are also aware of the trauma for the Skripals of having to come and give evidence of something they have already been through, which is pretty horrific by anybody\u2019s standards, to ask them to do that. So they [the Sturgess family] are not anxious to have them called; they are, in a sense, protective of them.\u201d<\/p>\n
The judge then asked Holborn to speak for the Skripals. \u201cA line does have to be drawn somewhere,\u201d he began. Then he drew the line the British government is insisting on \u2013 nothing from the Skripals since the police interviews of six years ago, and nothing in the transcripts which the government doesn\u2019t want to be known publicly. In short, a gag.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur primary position,\u201d Holborn went on, \u201cis that you [Hughes] will have sufficient \u2014 and of course you have seen the police interviews \u2014 to say we definitely don\u2019t need them. \u00a0But my fallback position is definitely: yes, it is no more than keeping it open \u2013 THE CHAIRMAN: \u00a0All right. MR HOLBORN: \u00a0\u2014 until the family are able to frame what questions they actually need to ask in light of the transcripts, which we suspect [sic] will provide a great deal of information.\u201d<\/p>\n
Holborn was conceding he hasn\u2019t read the Skripal interviews himself.<\/p>\n
He then told the court he doesn\u2019t want the Skripals to say anything for themselves. \u201cI would otherwise flag three limited points, the first of which is: no security measures are perfect.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cTHE CHAIRMAN: \u00a0Yes. MR HOLBORN: \u00a0The second of which, which the family have very \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0fairly acknowledged, is the distress to the Skripals of giving evidence. The third of which is the point made in our most recent submissions that perhaps the issue of \u00a0preventability may be better addressed by other core \u00a0participants and really isn\u2019t obviously a matter on which the Skripals can necessarily give the most helpful evidence, bearing in mind a lot of it will presumably \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0relate to the aftermath of the incident.\u201d<\/p>\n
By \u201cfamily\u201d, Holborn was referring to the Sturgess family. He did not mean, and he has made no contact with the Skripal family in Russia.<\/p>\n
The \u201crecent submissions\u201d Holborn says he has made to Lord Hughes remain secret. They have not been disclosed publicly on the inquiry website.<\/p>\n
About \u201cdistress\u201d and \u201cpreventability\u201d, Holborn was lying. When they were last free to speak, neither Sergei nor Yulia Skripal showed distress over what has happened; they did reveal they had to talk quickly and in secret to avoid MI6 surveillance of their telephones. In the earlier interviews Sergei Skripal reportedly gave Mark Urban, an MI6 placeman at the BBC, \u00a0he implied there was much he might tell about the MI6 net which was covering him until the Salisbury incident.<\/p>\n
Holborn\u2019s representation in court for the Skripals was so short, he omitted to say that they had told him anything ahead of his appearance before Hughes on June 21.<\/p>\n
The judge then asked the Home Office lawyer Cathryn McGahey KC to respond. She confirmed there is a gag on the Skripals, and that this has been accepted in Holborn\u2019s secret submission to the inquiry. \u201cHMG [Her Majesty\u2019s government] supports the submissions made by Mr Holborn on behalf of the Skripals,\u201d she claimed before gagging herself. \u201cThere is no more I can say in open session. \u00a0The safety of the Skripals is paramount.\u201d<\/p>\n
She then told the judge not to call the Skripals to testify either in writing or in open hearing. \u201cEven if they were to be called,\u201d McGahey said, \u201cdifferent considerations may very well apply to different topics, and the topic of preventability [read MI6] is one which will almost certainly be fraught with difficulty, unless there were very strict control over the questions. \u00a0And most of the material is likely to be closed anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n
No questions are to be allowed for the Skripals; no answers from them, either.<\/p>\n
Hughes said he proposed to come to a decision in secret. \u201cMy inclination is to await the disclosure of the interviews in particular, and any other material which comes with \u00a0it, before making any final decision about the Skripals.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hughes has refused to say in open court that he has verified the Skripals are alive and free to instruct lawyers to represent them. Holborn also refuses to confirm that his clients are alive. He was asked by email four questions to clarify whether Holborn is representing the Skripals or the government which is paying his fee.<\/p>\n
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Holborn has not responded.<\/p>\n
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