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We can do that, too. Thank you very much. We agree to those suggestions.

PE1934 is on developing an education resource on gender-based violence for all year groups in high school. It has been lodged by Craig Scoular on behalf of Greenfaulds high school rights and equalities committee. The petition calls on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to work with Education Scotland to develop such an educational resource. The resource should educate on the causes of gender-based violence and ensure that young people leave school with the tools to help them to create a safer society for women.

Statistics on gender-based violence are included in the petition background information. The petitioner states that

“educating our children will end any existing cycles of gender-based violence and prevent any new ones from starting.”

The Scottish Government’s response outlines existing resources and guidance that are relevant to the subject of the petition. They include learning about topics including, in primary school, gender-biased expectations, up to learning about sexual harassment and feminism in high school. It also states that the gender-based violence in schools working group will review existing resources, identify effective practice examples and develop new resources.

Based on the evidence that we have received on this important petition, do members have any comments or suggestions for action?

Shall we write to COSLA in the first instance?

Members indicated agreement.

In your case, you felt that the value of your lost child was quantified at £300, and that did not seem to you to represent a fair or just outcome.

The last of our continued petitions this morning is PE1917, which was lodged by Amy Stevenson and calls on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to provide full legal aid to all parents who are fighting for access to their child or children, regardless of income.

When we last considered the petition, on 18 May 2022, we agreed to write to the Scottish Government, seeking more information on the review of the legal aid system and on its plans for a provisional timetable for bringing forward the Legal Aid Reform (Scotland) Bill. Since then, we have received a response from the Scottish Government, which was included in our meeting papers for this morning. Do members have any suggestions about how we might respond accordingly?

PE1935 is to urge the Scottish Government to create a committee outside the Parliament to judge whether ministers have broken the ministerial code. The petition has been lodged by Dillon Crawford.

The petitioner considers that a committee of non-MSPs would be able to act independently because they would not be affiliated to a party. The Scottish Government’s submission details the process by which ministers are held to account. Ministers are bound by the Scottish ministerial code, and a group of independent advisers currently exists to provide the First Minister with advice on which to base judgments in relation to conduct.

I think that PE1935 is an interesting petition. It is obviously motivated by current events. I wonder whether, in the first instance, we might invite the Scottish Parliament information centre to do a little bit of further work on how the various Parliaments within the UK currently process and deal with such business. I do not know where the Scottish system fits in with the systems in Northern Ireland, Wales or the rest of the UK, and I think that the petitioner and the public probably feel that there is a slight lack of transparency about how the arrangements have arisen. It would be useful for us at least to pull that work together and look at it as we consider the petition further.

Are colleagues content with that?

Members indicated agreement.

Good morning. I welcome everyone to the 12th meeting—in 2022, for the avoidance of doubt—of the Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee.

Our first agenda item is consideration of continued petitions. The first of those is PE1887, which was lodged by Nicola Murray. The petition calls on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to create an unborn victims of violence act, creating a specific offence that enables courts to hand down longer sentences for perpetrators of domestic abuse that causes a miscarriage.

We are joined by Nicola Murray and her mother, Julie Ruzgar. I am delighted that you have come and are with us. The committee does not routinely hear from petitioners now because of the volume of petitions that we receive. However, we thought that it would be helpful in this particular instance to give Nicola Murray an opportunity to speak to the committee about why her petition is important. We will also be holding a round-table session on the petition. We had hoped that that might take place later today, but the availability of other parties who want to participate in the session is such that it will take place in our first meeting after the summer recess.

Today, we will hear evidence from Nicola Murray and then we will continue the petition, to allow us to have a round-table discussion at the beginning of September. We are grateful to Nicola and her mother for travelling to the Parliament. Before we move on to explore the issue further—obviously, we have considered it previously and have read the various submissions—the committee would like to give you a few moments to say anything that you might like to say, whether prepared or spontaneous, by way of an introduction.

You touched briefly on the criminal justice system. What was your experience of that?

Thank you. Your testimony has been compelling. Once we come back in September, we will have a round-table meeting with various representative groups, so we will keep the petition open and seek to take forward the issues that are raised in it.

Colleagues, it occurs to me that, once we have heard a little more about the issue, the committee might well wish to suggest that it be the subject of a full chamber debate. In that way, the Government would be brought to the chamber to discuss with us the issues that it will have explored in the autumn. That might be another route for us to take.

I thank Nicola Murray and Julie Ruzgar very much for coming. I suspend the meeting.

We thank the petitioner for raising the petition, but we will close the petition under rule 15.7 for the reasons that David Torrance has suggested.