Current Petitions

Item 2 is consideration of current petitions, which are petitions that we have considered before. We have 13 of them today. The first is PE504, by Mr and Mrs James Watson, which is on not allowing individuals who have been involved in crimes to make profits by selling accounts of their crimes for publication.The petition has been in the system for a considerable time; it is one of our oldest petitions. We have had a kind of tennis match, backwards and forwards, with discussion of legal processes with the United Kingdom Home Office and authorities in Scotland, to try to clarify the matter. There are still some outstanding issues for us to explore, so I do not think that we would wish to close the petition today. We are still waiting for a final resolution by getting agreement for the minister perhaps to take some action. Are members happy for us to continue to explore the outstanding issues?Members indicated agreement.

We will keep the petition open and ask the Ministry of Justice and the Scottish Government how they will deal with the publication of criminal memoirs following the libel working group report.