An advocate who was appointed as a lead junior counsel to the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry has been arrested for sexual offences.
John Halley, 59, was arrested on February 15 at an address in the Caddonfoot area, near Galashiels. He is due to appear at Livingston sheriff court at a later date.
He was called to the Bar in 1997 and has since worked in family law, particularly with respect to how the law affects children. He was appointed as a lead junior counsel to the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry (SCAI) by the former chairwoman, Susan O’Brien KC. He ceased being instructed by the inquiry and has done no work for it since October 2016.
The inquiry was set up to investigate the abuse of children in care in Scotland, determining the facts of the abuse, the effects of abuse on children and their families and whether the organisations responsible for children in care failed in their duties.
It began its work in October 2015. It is chaired by Lady Anne Smith, a Supreme Court judge in Scotland, who was appointed in August 2016.
This year, Halley alleged that there were links between members of Scotland’s legal establishment and the sexual exploitation of children in care. He first raised concerns about alleged connections between senior Scottish legal figures and the abuse of children in care in 2019. Halley, who is also a part-time sheriff, detailed his claims in a 43-page note to prosecutors.
The disclosure prompted Russell Findlay, the Scottish Conservative MSP, to write to John Swinney, the deputy first minister, calling for details of the investigation into these allegations to be made public.
Halley’s note called for a deeper investigation of Tam Paton, the former Bay City Rollers manager who died in 2009. Paton owned an Edinburgh flat where a 16-year-old boy from a care home was held over ten days, drugged and raped by a number of men in the early 1990s.
The case led to allegations of an establishment abuse ring that was said to have operated over several decades and to have included TV personalities, judges, lawyers and police officers.
Halley has also previously said that vulnerable young people in care had been let down by a prosecution policy that he believes failed to prevent sexual exploitation through prostitution. The policy, introduced in 1991, concluded that it was not in the public interest to pursue clients of male prostitutes as young as 16 who had previously engaged in homosexual acts.
A spokesman for Police Scotland said a search warrant had been executed and a 59-year-old man “arrested and charged in connection with sexual offences”.
A spokesman for the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service said: “A report has been received and is under consideration by the procurator fiscal.”
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