An odd DPP letter and a curious government witness statement – an overall view of the dropped Chinese prosecutions

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In a few posts last week I wrote about the dropped prosecutions of the two alleged spies for China. These posts were here and, on Friday, at Prospect (click here).

Partly publishing these posts was because of the inherent interest of the case, and partly this was because new information arose – in particular, the government witness statements.

Just now taking a step back, why should this case be of any wider interest? Why is not just another collapsed case, one of many that happen every court day?

The interest does not come (for me) from it being related to China. This is not a foreign policy or a security policy blog, and I am indifferent whether the other country involved in this case is China or any other country.

This is, however, a blog about legal messes, and it is a blog that often focuses on close readings of documents (usually so as to understand how legal messes come about).

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And in this case, there is a mess. A major prosecution has been dropped and nobody – at least outside of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) – knows why. But what we can be reasonably certain about is that the CPS’s public reasons for dropping the case do not add up.

(It initially seemed the government’s position also did not add up, but the publication of the witness statements rebutted this view. That said, we do not know what, if any, other interventions the government may have made.)

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Then there are two extraordinary documents.

The first is the letter dated 7 October 2025 from the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), the head of the CPS, to two parliamentary committee chairs. In this he gets the court wrong whose decision he is blaming and curiously switches from the first person to the third person at a significant point.

The second is the first witness published statement, the only one (correctly) dated from before the charges were made against the two defendants. Here, as this blog has shown, the witness is being asked by the CPS to give evidence under the wrong Act. This is why he does not give evidence that China is an “enemy”.

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My opinion is that the letter dated 7 October 2025 is a misleading document.

The error by the DPP (of all people!) to get the court wrong – referring to the (generally civil) high court instead of the criminal court of appeal on appeal from the criminal court) – suggests he was not personally familiar with the case in question. It is the sort of mistake senior lawyers make when they have not actually read a case themselves. As such it looks more a line-to-take he has inserted into the letter from somebody else.

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Lets look further:

I am satisfied that the decision to charge this case in April 2024 was correct. This was on the basis of where the law stood at that time in relation to the requirements of the Official Secrets Act 1911.

But we know from the first witness statement that the witness was not asked about the legal test in the 1911 Act. He was asked about the test in the 2023 Act which did not apply at the relevant time. So unless there is evidence of which we do not know, the decision to charge was based on evidence for a different offence, which did not require evidence of an enemy.

If this is correct, the quoted statement above cannot be right.

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Lets go on:

Some weeks later, a High Court decision (R v Roussev and others 2024) ruled that “enemy” for the purposes of the 1911 Act includes a country which represents at the time of the offence, a threat to the national security of the UK.

Here is referring to a decision of the court of appeal on appeal from the crown court.

But this decision widened the definition of “enemy” not narrowed it.

This means if the evidential test had actually been met before it would necessarily have been met again.

This too is not a correct statement by the DPP.

(And “weeks”? The court of appeal decision of July 2024 is not only weeks after the charging decision of April 2024.)

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It is however correct that the DPP now start pressing the government for evidence about the enemy. This explains the second (incorrectly dated) witness statement of 21 February 2025 and the third witness statement of 4 August 2025.

Why did it take until February and August 2025 for the witness to be asked to give evidence which is (supposedly) prompted by a court decision of July 2024?

It seems that it is not until February 2025 that the CPS actually have the evidence that would have justified the original charging decision of April 2024, let alone any re-visiting of that evidential test.

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And finally:

In the light of this new judgment, it was considered that further evidence should be obtained. Efforts to obtain that evidence were made over many months, but notwithstanding the fact that further witness statements were provided, none of these stated that at the time of the offence China represented a threat to national security, and by late August 2025 it was realised that this evidence would not be forthcoming. When this became apparent, the case could not proceed.

This account is also not correct.

The second (incorrectly dated) witness statement of 21 February 2025 and the third witness statement of 4 August 2025 both provide evidence that China is expressly a threat, especially paragraphs 4 to 7 of the latter statement

To say that “by late August 2025 it was realised that this evidence would not be forthcoming” makes no sense against the published witness statements.

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Sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, the DPP letter dated 7 October 2025 does not add up, and it contains a sequence of incorrect and misleading statements.

It is an odd letter for a DPP to send about a legal mess.

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And as this blog focuses on legal messes and close readings of such documents that is why this blog has published a few posts on this subject.

The analysis on this blog, however, does not make out any conspiracy theory. As is said above, we do not know why the prosecution was dropped – and there may be evidence of interventions and decisions which we do not have.

We only know, on the basis of official documents, that the official explanation makes no sense.