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To: maceng2 who wrote (561)	1/29/2004 10:02:56 AM
From: maceng2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1417

Is Hutton's reputation in tatters? January 29 2004 at 02:27PM iol.co.za By Robert Holloway London - Brian Hutton, the judge who cleared Prime Minister Tony Blair but castigated the BBC, appeared to have damaged his own reputation on Thursday as fellow members of the British establishment questioned his judgement. A former chief justice of Northern Ireland, Hutton led an inquiry into the suicide in July of David Kelly, the arms expert at the centre of a row over a BBC report that Blair deliberately exaggerated the case for invading Iraq. Hutton on Wednesday exonerated Blair, his aides and the defence ministry but said the BBC's claims were unfounded and its editorial procedures defective - a finding that prompted the immediate resignation of BBC chairperson Gavyn Davies. 'I want to book Lord Hutton now as a trial judge' The verdict on Hutton himself ranged from complaints that he interpreted his remit too narrowly, to the charge of double standards. Tongue-in-cheek, former cabinet minister Robin Cook, who resigned over the decision to invade Iraq, told the daily Independent: "If ever I am up in court on a serious charge, I want to book Lord Hutton now as a trial judge." The "fastidious" Hutton had used such "impeccable standards of proof" that it was inevitable he would clear the prime minister of blame, said Cook, a former foreign secretary under Blair. Davies's predecessor at the BBC, Christopher Bland, the current chairperson of British Telecom, questioned the judge's impartiality. "He whitewashed the government, and maybe he was right to do that, but he tarred and feathered the BBC and there just seems to be a real imbalance in his treatment," Bland told a television interviewer. 'He whitewashed the government' Anthony Scrivener, a former chairperson of the Bar, the professional courtroom lawyers' association, described Hutton to the Guardian as "a conventional conservative, with a small 'c', judge." The newspaper quoted another senior lawyer and member of the House of Lords, Anthony Lester, as saying Hutton was "a great trial judge, impeccable in his factual findings," but one unversed in "the wider constitutional issues." Born on June 29, 1931 Hutton began his career in Northern Ireland in 1954, becoming a high court judge in 1979 and Chief Justice in 1988, a position he held for nine years. His upper-class education, at Shrewsbury School and at Balliol College, Oxford, exposed him to mockery in newspaper reports of the way he pronounced "sexed-up" - the phrase used by the BBC to describe the exaggeration of the Iraqi threat by Blair's communications director Alastair Campbell. Hutton spat out the phrase with "a tiny, disdainful uplifting of his chin," the Daily Telegraph said. In 1997 Hutton became one of the law lords who comprise Britain's supreme court, ending his career when he retired this month. As a law lord, he for the first time encountered public controversy. He ruled that Chilean former dictator Augusto Pinochet was liable to be extradited for crimes of torture committed after 1988. But he supported Pinochet's appeal against the ruling on the grounds that a fellow law lord had failed to disclose his links with Amnesty International. In another high-profile case, Hutton ruled that revelations by a former British spy about the workings of the intelligence services were not in the public interest. - Sapa-AFP