Huhne challenges Straw over bugging of lawyers

3.00.00pm UTC (GMT +0000) Tue 12th Feb 2008

Liberal Democrat Shadow Home Secretary, Chris Huhne, has written to Jack Straw asking which senior police officers authorised the regular bugging of lawyer-client discussions at prisons. Mr Huhne also pressed Mr Straw to state how many prisoners had been bugged in this way in each year for the last five years and urged him to make a full statement as soon as the House of Commons returns from recess. The Liberal Democrats are pressing for a full inquiry into the new allegations that bugging was extensive, systematic and routine.

Liberal Democrat Shadow Home Secretary Chris Huhne said "The routine bugging of confidential discussions between a suspect and their lawyer is a giant stride towards a police state and a body blow to the fairness of the judicial process. Either ministers knew what was going on and were complicit in a wholesale undermining of the principle of lawyer-client confidentiality, or they have been so unaware of what is going on in their own departments as to connive unwittingly in a policy disaster."