At 09:30 on Friday morning, a Brazilian-born man called Jean Charles de Menezes left a house that police had identified as the home of a possible suspect. He was an electrician, on his way to a job in Kilburn. But the police, anxious to prevent another Tube attack, jumped to the wrong conclusion.
Ten years ago, less than a month after the 7/7 Bombings, the Metropolitian Police tracked and murdered Jean Charles de Menezes under the impression he was one of the people responsible for the botched attack the day before. Nobody has ever been prosecuted for it, though we did get that disgusting health & safety prosecution against the Met itself.
His family is currently in the UK to take part in remembrance ceremonies for him, but also to plead their case for The European Court of Human Rights:
Lawyers for the family argue that the assessment used by prosecutors in deciding that no individual should be charged over the 2005 shooting is incompatible with article 2 of the European convention on human rights, which covers the right to life.
They claim the evidential test applied by the Crown Prosecution Service – that there should be sufficient evidence for a “realistic prospect” of conviction – is too high a threshold. It means that, in effect, the decision not to bring a prosecution was based on a conclusion that there was less than a 50% chance of conviction, they say.
It remains an outrage that ten years after his murder, there’s still no real justice for Jean, with his murderers and those who unleashed them never having had to feel the consequences of their actions. It also shows why the ECHR is so important, the last hope of all those denied justice in their own country’s courts.
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