From today’s Guardian Unlimited…

The government should be stripped of its power to stop prosecutions in the national interest, a professor of law at Cambridge University said yesterday.

John Spencer called the power to halt cases “the sort of thing you find in countries where the rule of law is not respected, and where criminal justice is instrumentalised [used by] the government as a stick with which to beat its political enemies, while its friends are allowed to flout the law with impunity.”