JUST WAIT A WHILE

"If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone."
-Phil Jones, Warmaquiddick Email

When the Warmaquiddick story first broke, one of the first questions many people asked was "how are they avoiding prosecution for failing to deliver information upon freedom of information requests?" Even though Michael "Piltdown" Mann is in Eastanglia, the UK has freedom of information laws as well, requiring people who receive public funds to deliver paperwork and materials upon proper request.

The men working at this alarmist study center (Hadley CRU) refused to comply with such requests and in the uncontested emails even told each other to stonewall and destroy data to prevent the "wrong" people from getting their hands on it. Now, when the whole thing has blown up, we find that they somehow managed to "lose" most of the data their most basic studies and pertinent findings are based upon.

So how is it that there have been no criminal charges? Because in England, all you have to do is stall long enough. Ben Webster and Jonathan Leake at the Times report:

The Information Commissioner’s Office decided that UEA failed in its duties under the Act but said that it could not prosecute those involved because the complaint was made too late, The Times has learnt. The ICO is now seeking to change the law to allow prosecutions if a complaint is made more than six months after a breach.
...
A spokesman for the ICO said: “The legislation prevents us from taking any action but from looking at the emails it’s clear to us a breach has occurred.” Breaches of the act are punishable by an unlimited fine.

Basically, if you delay six months, then you can ignore the law. It can take longer than six months just to get the bureaucracy moving in some places, let alone to get a court case acted on. At present this law is utterly useless. As the man who initiated the Freedom of Information (FOI) request, an engineer named Holland, puts it:

The prosecution has to be initiated within six months but you have to exhaust the university’s complaints procedure before the commission will look at your complaint. That process can take longer than six months.”

There is work now in place to change the law so that you can still nail someone longer than six months after the request. Small wonder government lawyer types in the parliament would want to make it easy to blow off FOI requests, but the way the law is written, its utterly useless.

Still, you can't say Hadley CRU or the alarmist movement is getting away with anything. Their entire theory is melting away faster than Al Gore's version of arctic ice disappearance, and the head of the unit Phil Jones stepped down while the inquiries were taking place.