Victims, Witnesses, and Justice Reform (Scotland) Act 2025

Miscellaneous

21 Reports

(1) The Commissioner may publish any report, in addition to reports under sections 14 and 18, prepared by the Commissioner if the Commissioner considers it appropriate to do so.

(2) The Commissioner—

(a) must give a copy of a draft report to each criminal justice body not less than 5 days before publishing the report under subsection (1),

(b) may lay any report published under subsection (1) before the Scottish Parliament, if the Commissioner considers it appropriate to do so.

(3) The Commissioner must ensure that, so far as reasonably practicable having regard to the subject matter, a report does not name or otherwise identify an individual who has—

(a) given information to the Commissioner, and

(b) not consented to being named in the report.

22 Protection from actions of defamation

(1) For the purposes of the law of defamation—

(a) any statement made to the Commissioner has absolute privilege,

(b) any statement in the Commissioner’s report on an investigation has absolute privilege,

(c) any other statement made by the Commissioner has qualified privilege.

(2) In this section—

(a) a reference to a statement being made to or by the Commissioner—

(i) includes a statement being made to or by (as the case may be) a member of the Commissioner’s staff or an agent of the Commissioner,

(ii) does not include a statement made to or by (as the case may be) an individual when the individual is not acting in the individual’s capacity as the Commissioner, a member of the Commissioner’s staff or an agent of the Commissioner,

(b) “statement” has the same meaning as in the Defamation and Malicious Publication (Scotland) Act 2021.