9.11.2017 A & Ors v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2004] EWCA Civ 1123 (11 August 2004) 'admissibility' of the confession into an inquisition of an accused. That would be repugnant to our accepted standards and principles of justice; it would invite and encourage brutality in the handling of persons suspected of having committed offences" 92. I can read those statements only as an affirmation of the concern of the common law to protect accused persons from oppression. The rule was based not merely on concerns about the reliability of evidence obtained by oppression; it protected accused persons from oppression and marked the repugnance of the common law, in the context of criminal trials, to evidence so obtained from a defendant. Section 76 of the 1984 Act, influenced I would expect by the jurisprudence under Article 6 of the Convention, embodied the same principle. Abuse of process 93. Mr Emmerson also relies on the abuse of process jurisdiction exercised in criminal courts in England and Wales, which has, he submits, the same rationale as the exclusion of tainted confessions. In R v Horseferry Road Magistrates Court ex parte Bennett [1994] 1 AC 42, Lord Lowry stated, at page 76C: "… the court, in order to protect its own process from being degraded and misused, must have the power to stay proceedings which have come before it and have only been made possible by acts which offend the court's conscience as being contrary to the rule of law. Those acts by providing a morally unacceptable foundation for the exercise of jurisdiction over the suspect taint the proposed trial and, if tolerated, will mean that the court's process has been abused." 94. In R v Latif [1996] 1 WLR 104, Lord Steyn said, at page 112H: "The law is settled. Weighing countervailing considerations of policy and justice, it is for the judge in the exercise of his discretion to decide whether there has been an abuse of process, which amounts to an affront to the public conscience and requires the criminal proceedings to be stayed: R v Horseferry Road Magistrates' Court, ex p. Bennett… The speeches in Bennett conclusively establish that proceedings may be stayed in the exercise of the judge's discretion not only where a fair trial is impossible but also where it would be contrary to the public interest in the integrity of the criminal justice system that trial should take place. An infinite variety of cases could arise." 95. In R v Looseley, Attorney-General's Reference (No.3 of 2000) [2001] 1 WLR 2060, the House of Lords considered the admissibility of evidence obtained as a result of undercover police officers dealing with drug dealers. Lord Nicholls of Birkenhead stated, at paragraph 1: "My Lords, every court has an inherent power and duty to prevent abuse of its process. This is a fundamental principle of the rule of law. By recourse to this principle courts ensure that executive agents of the state do not misuse the coercive, law enforcement functions of the courts and thereby oppress citizens of the state. Entrapment, with which these two appeals are concerned, is an instance where such misuse may occur. It is simply not acceptable that the state through its agents should lure its citizens into committing acts forbidden by the law and then seek to prosecute them for doing so. That would be entrapment. That would be a misuse of state power, and an abuse of the process of the courts. The unattractive consequences, frightening and sinister in extreme cases, which state conduct of this nature could have are obvious. The role of the courts is to stand between the state and its citizens and make sure this does not happen." 96. Lord Nicholls referred to R v Sang [1980] AC 402, ex parte Bennett and Latif. He stated, at paragraph 15: "These statutory and common law developments have been reinforced by the Human Rights Act 1998. It is unlawful for the court, as a public authority, to act in a way which is incompatible with a Convention right. Entrapment, and the use of evidence obtained by http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2004/1123.html 21/113