Seòmar agus comataidhean

I apologise for the interruption—we have the windows open, because it is quite warm in the committee room. I think that we are fine now.

I am sure that there are points in your opening remarks that members will want to come back to. I will bring in Stuart Allardyce now.

Thank you. That is very helpful. We now open up to questions. I think that you covered this in your opening remarks, cabinet secretary, but can you confirm that the provisions that we are looking at would be for the duration of the general assembly event only and do not stretch beyond that? The policy note that we have says:

“it is necessary to grant INTERPOL the relevant privileges and immunities required to operate effectively across Great Britain and Northern Ireland on an ongoing basis.”

Can you confirm that that does not mean that, once the order is in place or if it is agreed to today, it would be a permanent provision?

On that note, I thank the cabinet secretary and her officials for their time. I suspend the meeting briefly to allow for a changeover of witnesses.

Maybe I can come back to you. I will let some other members come in.

A couple of members still want to come in, but I want to pick up on the discussion about data, which is an issue that the committee talks about quite a lot. I am interested in your views on what data we should collect to underpin the work on tackling gender-based violence or, in this case, tackling the online space. How do we do that when there are a lot of moving parts and different organisations have different roles and responsibilities relating to the overall work that is done? It would be helpful for the committee to understand how that underpinning data set could be developed.

Gosh, thanks very much. That brings in a whole other discussion about resourcing.

Stuart Allardyce, how can we make our collection of data as robust and targeted as possible?

Thank you. There was a lot in that answer.

Thanks, there was a lot in there. Some of our other panel members might like to come in briefly.

Our next item of business is consideration of correspondence that we have received from the Scottish Government and Rape Crisis Scotland on access to court transcripts for survivors of rape and sexual offences. I refer members to paper 4. I will begin by placing on record the committee’s thanks to one of the survivors, who we met informally in November 2021, for her bravery in telling us about her experience of the criminal justice system and for raising the important issue of the lack of access to court transcripts for survivors of rape and sexual offences and how that can impact on their recovery.

I very much welcome the commitment made by the Cabinet Secretary for Justice and Home Affairs in her letter to the committee, and by the First Minister last week, to consider a pilot to support access to transcripts for complainers in sexual offences cases.

I seek members’ views on the correspondence that we have received.