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Although the current arrangements are working well, we believe there is room for further improvement. We propose to establish the Board as a statutory body to ensure that the review process is more firmly based and be seen to be operating more independently. The new Board, called Long-term Prison Sentences Review Board, will consist entirely of non-official members, including two judicial members, one of whom shall be the President of the Board and the other shall be the Deputy President.
We propose to further enhance the operation of the prison sentence review system. To this end, the Bill provides the new Board with additional tools to help it in discharging its functions. First, the Bill empowers the new Board to prescribe post- release supervision orders for prisoners serving indeterminate sentences which have been changed to determinate sentences by the Governor on the Board's advice. Post- release supervision for prisoners serving determinate sentences would continue to be dealt with by the Post-Release Supervision Board. The new Long-term Prison Sentences Review Board should be in a better position to monitor long-term prisoners, since it would have been regularly reviewing these cases throughout the period of their sentences. Moreover, as there is a degree of cross-membership between the two Boards, our proposal should ensure that the approach to post-release supervision adopted by both Boards will be broadly consistent with each other.
Secondly, the Bill enables the new Board to allow certain prisoners to be released conditionally under conditional release orders. With these two new tools, the range of options available to the Board would be widened, thus helping the Board to exercise its functions more effectively and with greater confidence.
When our initial proposals were discussed by the Security Panel of this Council, concern was expressed by some Honourable Members, and some prisoners' families about the uncertainty of detention at Her Majesty's Pleasure, or HMP. HMP prisoners were convicted of murder but were sentenced, on account of their young age, to detention at Her Majesty's Pleasure, which is a form of indeterminate sentence, instead of capital punishment. Since the abolition of the death penalty in 1993, persons convicted of murder who were under the age of 18 at the time of their offence have been given mandatory life sentences. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that detention at HMP should be treated as equivalent to discretionary life sentence, and that a discretionary life prisoner is entitled to have the lawfulness of his continued detention tested before a court, which term, in this context, encompasses an independent Board such as the proposed Long-term Prison Sentences Review Board, after he has served the punitive part of his sentence.