Recommendation 7

We did not find evidence of deliberate efforts to obstruct the prosecution. The sequence of events nevertheless raises some substantial questions of whether the Government officials and counsel working on the DNSA’s witness statements could have found an alternative formulation which remained in line with the government’s overarching position at the time. This would have made clear that China posed an active national security threat. We note that the Crown Prosecution Service made extensive and repeated efforts to obtain evidence to this effect. It also raises the question of whether the Crown Prosecution Service was right to conclude that the legal tests remained unmet. (Conclusion, Paragraph 73)