Equality and Human Rights Commission

After the intial call for evidence, we held a series of inquiry panels to hear evidence from invited witnesses relevant to the Terms of Reference. Those invited include Whitehall departments, Inspectorates, public authorities and advice and advocacy bodies. We also heard evidence from the legal community, the media and from individual claimants who had successfully used human rights arguments in court or to resolve disputes with public authorities.

The Inquiry Panels were held in various locations in September and October 2008. Each inquiry panel was chaired by Dame Nuala O'Loan, the chair of the Human Rights Inquiry. For each session she was joined by a panel made upon one or more of the other Human Rights Inquiry Commissioners: Professor Francesca Klug; Sir Bert Massie; and Dr Neil Wooding.

In order to make this process as open as possible, the inquiry panels were, wherever possible, held in public. However, there may have been circumstances when the Inquiry Panel heard evidence in private, for example where the nature of the evidence might have raised issues of the confidentiality or privacy of the witness or others, where giving the evidence in public might have caused distress to the witness or where it would have amounted to a reasonable adjustment under the Disability Discrimination Act.

Transcripts

These are contemporaneous transcripts of the oral evidence given to the Human Rights Inquiry’s 17 days of inquiry panel hearings. They were created by a palantypist who attended the evidence giving session. We have provided an opportunity for witnesses to make minor corrections to their content where the original transcript rendered the evidence given difficult to understand. We have also made minor grammatical edits to make the transcripts easier to read. However, they remain a record of oral evidence and should be read as such and not scrutinised in the same way as a written submission might be.

In certain cases, practical difficulties with the transcription process meant that witnesses had to make more significant edits to their transcripts in order to ensure accuracy. In some cases it has not been possible to reconstruct the evidence given and in those cases the relevant passages have been omitted. This particularly applies to some of the evidence given at the session the Inquiry held in North Wales on 19 September 2009.