To provide justice to the hundreds of wrongly convicted employees of the state-owned Post Office in the Horizon IT Scandal, United Kingdom Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Wednesday announced that his government would bring in an emergency law to speed up compensation and quash the convictions.
Describing the scandal as “One of the greatest miscarriages of justice in our nation’s history”, Sunak stated that his government will introduce new legislation to make sure that the victims of the scandal are “swiftly exonerated and compensated”. He added, “People who worked hard to serve their communities had their lives and their reputations destroyed through absolutely no fault of their own.”
What Is the Decade-Long IT Scandal?
Between 1999 and 2015, the UK Post Office had prosecuted hundreds of sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses for alleged theft, fraud, and false accounting based on the information from a recently installed IT system.
The decades-long scandal involves thousands of branch owner-operators and hundreds of wrongful convictions. According to the BBC, there are more than 900 convictions linked to the scandal over 16 years, which is frequently described as the most widespread miscarriage of justice in UK history.
How Did It Harm the Innocent People and Was Justice Served?
Hundreds of sub-post office operators ended up with criminal records and punishments, such as being jailed. Many were left struggling financially or some even went bankrupt following convictions. Victims and their families were severely hit by stress and in many cases illness, with the scandal linked to at least four suicides.
For years the Post Office, which has the power to investigate and prosecute people without the need for police involvement, continued to defend itself against accusations..
Then, finally, in 2019, a group of post office operators won a high court case in which their convictions were ruled “wrongful” and the Horizon IT system was ruled to be at fault. In 2021, the ruling was upheld on appeal, quashing the convictions of some workers who were wrongly accused.
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