Cabinet Office loses authorized battle over Boris Johnson’s COVID Whatsapp messages
The Cabinet Office has misplaced its bid to withhold Boris Johnson’s unredacted WhatsApp messages and notebooks from the COVID-19 Inquiry following a authorized battle.
The High Court dominated the Cabinet Office should hand over all of the paperwork requested by the inquiry’s chair Baroness Heather Hallett, who issued a piece 21 discover for the fabric.
The court docket dominated: “In our judgment the fact that the section 21 notice will yield some irrelevant documents does not invalidate the notice or mean that the section 21 [notice] cannot be lawfully exercised.”
The authorities stated it’ll “comply fully” with the High Court judgment.
Baroness Hallett issued an order to launch the previous prime minister’s paperwork in May, however the authorities opposed it.
It then took took the bizarre step final month of bringing a judicial review of Baroness Hallett’s order to launch Boris Johnson’s unredacted WhatsApp messages and notebooks.
In its reasoning for launching the judicial evaluation, the federal government stated it had executed so with “regret” however that “important issues of principle” have been at stake round privateness.
It additionally questioned whether or not Baroness Hallett had “the power to compel production of documents and messages which are unambiguously irrelevant to the inquiry’s work”, and argued that requesting such materials “represents an unwarranted intrusion into other aspects of the work of government”.
But Baroness Hallett argued it’s as much as her to determine what proof is “relevant or potentially relevant” amid the authorized row over the previous prime minister’s paperwork.
However, Mr Johnson later decided to bypass the Cabinet Office by sending “all unredacted WhatsApps” on to the COVID inquiry, saying he was “perfectly content” for the fabric to be inspected.
The former prime minister stated he would “like to do the same” with texts which are on an previous cell phone he stopped utilizing because of safety issues in May 2021 – greater than a 12 months after the pandemic started.
He stated he had requested the federal government for its assist to activate the machine securely at hand over the fabric.