Boys’ names taken off sex offenders’ list after legal battle

TWO schoolboys yesterday won a legal battle to have their names taken off the sex offenders register after the High Court ruled their human rights had been breached.

One 15-year-old youth from Co Durham in England had admitted ''pinging bra straps and touching girls on the bottom playfully'' at school, and a second 15-year-old confessed to putting his hand up a girl's skirt and pinching her while standing on a platform at New Cross Gate station, in south-east London.

The boy from Co Durham described as R, and U from the London area ended up on the sex offenders register as a result of the system of reprimands and warnings introduced under the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act.

Reprimands and warnings are administered when a young person with a clean record admits an offence and a police officer considers that, although he has evidence which would probably result in a conviction, it would not be in the public interest to prosecute.

In both cases the police decided the boys should be given final warnings and as a result were required to register under the 1997 Sex Offenders Act a consequence of which neither was aware when the warnings were issued.

Yesterday's court challenge centred on whether the failure to alert them before they consented to the warnings was incompatible with human rights law.

Lord Justice Latham, sitting with Mr Justice Field, ruled it was incompatible with Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right to a fair hearing.

The judges declared: "In the two cases with which we are concerned, there has clearly been no informed consent, so there has been a breach of the claimants' Article 6 rights."

The two judges heard that a number of girls made complaints against R in November 2001 over what they considered to be indecent assaults, and as a result he was excluded from school.

The court heard he had lost all his friends and become suicidal after being placed on the register.

The boy U, also 15, had admitted putting his hand up a girl's skirt and pinching her while standing on the platform at New Cross Gate in May 2001 and he understood that it was wrong.