Craig Sweeney

For the U.S. television producer/writer, see Craig Sweeny.

Craig John Sweeney[1] (born 1981 in South Glamorgan) is a Welsh child sex offender, from Newport, Gwent.

Public criticism of Sweeney's sentence voiced by Home Secretary John Reid prompted the House of Commons Constitutional Affairs Committee to recommend that the Ministerial Code be amended with guidelines to govern the public comments of ministers about individual judges to reinforce the provisions within the Constitutional Reform Act 2005.[2]

The Committee wrote: "The Sweeney case was the first big test of whether the new relationship between the Lord Chancellor [i.e. Lord Falconer] and the judiciary was working properly, and it is clear that there was a systemic failure."[2][3]

In 2008, Lord Phillips, the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, announced that in response to "widespread inaccurate media coverage" of Sweeney's sentencing, five judges were being trained to be the first official media spokesmen for the judiciary.[4]

  1. ^ "Toddler kidnap accused in court". 6 January 2006.
  2. ^ a b Masterman, Roger (2011). "The independence of the judiciary". The Separation of Powers in the Contemporary Constitution: Judicial Competence and Independence in the United Kingdom. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. p. 224. ISBN 978-0-521-49337-6.
  3. ^ House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution (26 July 2007), "Chapter 5: Conclusions and Recommendations" (PDF), Relations between the executive, the judiciary and Parliament, London: The Stationery Office Limited, p. 54, retrieved 7 February 2011
  4. ^ Gibb, Frances (3 April 2008). "Faith in legal system vanishing, says judge". The Sunday Times. Retrieved 7 February 2011.