On January 21, a bomb warning was received threatening to blow up the law courts. This is not an uncommon occurrence. The law courts have over the years been the subject of many bomb threats. Thankfully, up to now, these have proved to be hoax calls made by individuals for reasons unknown, perhaps because they had an interest in disrupting a case in which they were involved, or simply to create disruption to the lives of other citizens.
Whatever the causes, the recent incident caught the public attention because the law courts were not evacuated. Although, as soon as the bomb warning was received, an order was issued for the building to be evacuated, this was rescinded within a few minutes by the ministry’s secretariat which laid down that the business of the law courts was to proceed.
When pressed in the House on this particular incident, both the Minister for Home Affairs and Security and the Parliamentary Secretary for Justice stated it had not been unusual in the past for bomb warnings to be received and for the law courts not to be evacuated. The procedures followed in this case were not new, they maintained.
These statements have been strenuously rejected by two former justice ministers who between them were responsible for the administration of the law courts for almost a decade.
While the disagreement between current Labour and former Nationalist justice ministers might be put down to tribal politics, this is too serious a matter in itself to be left at that. The law courts can, at any one time, house some 500 people. The consequences of a bomb going off in such a crowded building would be catastrophic.
No information has been provided to explain the security basis on which such a critical decision, which could have involved a matter of life or death, was taken on January 21. On the face of it, it would seem highly irresponsible for the decision not to evacuate to have been taken on the basis of the say-so of some ministerial secretariat located a few hundred yards away from the scene of the incident, as appears to have happened in this case.
The crux of the issue, therefore, is what procedures actually exist for dealing with bomb threats. Who is responsible for implementing them; and on what basis is a judgment made whether or not to evacuate the building? Who is designated as having the authority and, more importantly, the responsibility for such decisions? The bottom line - who, in the event of a tragedy, would be held accountable?
A professional and well-ordered system would have a formally appointed individual responsible for managing all bomb threat situations. This would include the implementation of all the procedures and precautions necessary, including regular practice, assembly areas and clear instructions about arrangements for safeguarding personal belongings on evacuation.
The designated person would be responsible for making the decision whether or not to evacuate the building. Such a decision would be dependent on a very fine judgment about whether the warning constituted a malicious prank or was genuine.
Unless the law courts have a fool-proof system of identifying hoax callers, the standard response should be to evacuate the building – inconvenient though this will be – while the police and, if necessary, the bomb disposal personnel carry out a thorough search of the building.
Bomb threats and their potential impact on public safety are too serious a matter to be dealt with in a slap-dash manner.