The Litvinenko Inquiry

Part 9 | Chapters 1 to 12 | Who directed the killing?
9.44 The paucity of the public information relating to the inner workings of President Putin’s
administration was, indeed, a theme of Professor Service’s evidence. As he put the
matter: “It cannot be emphasised too heavily that public access to information about
Russian politics has undergone a severe constriction since Vladimir Putin’s accession
to Presidential power in 2000.” 8
9.45 As I have indicated, there were occasions in the course of his evidence where
Professor Service stated that the lack of public information in respect of an issue
meant that he was unable to express a view about it. He suggested, moreover, that
there were reasons going beyond academic or judicial rigour why this Inquiry ought
to be careful to restrict its conclusions to matters that were provable on the evidence
before it. He said this: 9
“But we have to be really cautious – and there’s another aspect of this that exercises
me, and that’s that Russians want to see us fairly going through evidence in a
scholarly environment or a judicial environment or an Inquiry like this in a fashion
that they know doesn’t happen in their own country. So we must not sink at all
below our conventional standards. We absolutely mustn’t, because some of what
we do in relation to this Inquiry will get back to Moscow, and we must not give them
the opportunity to say that we failed to respect our own standards because those
are standards that are really worth keeping to.”
I wholeheartedly endorse these sentiments, which accurately reflect my approach to
the evidence.
8
INQ019146 (page 4 paragraph 9)
9
Service 28/62
215