Complaints made against States Members (FOI)

Produced by the Freedom of Information office
Authored by Government of Jersey on behalf of the States Greffe and published on 23 November 2017.
Prepared internally, no external costs.

​​Request

I would like to know how many complaints have been made to the Privileges and Procedures Committee against States Members in the past two years.

I would like a breakdown by States members and nature of the complaint. For each complaint considered could you say if it has been upheld or not, and what steps were taken afterwards.

Response

The Privileges and Procedures Committee have considered a total of 13 complaints in relation to the conduct of State’s Members between November 2015 and August 2017, details of which are shown in the table below.

Complaints in relation to Deputy S.Y. Mézec have already been listed as part of the response to a previous Freedom of Information request but have been reproduced here in order to provide a full and complete answer to this request. The previous Freedom of Information request can be found at the following link:

Propositions​ tabled by Deputy Sam Mezec (FOI)

​Complaints received subsequent to the last complaint listed below have been referred to the newly appointed Commissioner for Standards and are currently under consideration.

​Date	​States Member	​Nature of complaint and outcome
​November 2015	​Deputy S.Y. Mézec	​Nature of what the Deputy had written on a Facebook page. The complaint was not upheld.
​November 2015	​Deputy S.Y. Mézec	​Nature of what the Deputy had written on a Facebook page. The complaint was upheld and Deputy Mézec was asked to remove from any public Facebook pages, to which he still had access, the posts about which the complaint had been made.
​November 2015	​Deputy S.Y. Mézec	​Nature of what the Deputy had written on a Facebook page. The complaint was upheld and Deputy Mézec was asked to remove from any public Facebook pages, to which he still had access, the posts about which the complaint had been made.
​November 2015	​Deputy S.Y. Mézec	​Nature of what the Deputy had written on a Facebook page. The complaint was not upheld. The complaint was reconsidered in February 2016 and August 2016 at the request of the complainant. The complaint was not upheld.
​November 2015	​Deputy S.Y. Mézec	​Nature of what the Deputy had written on a Facebook page. The complaint was upheld and Deputy Mézec was asked to remove from any public Facebook pages, to which he still had access, the posts about which the complaint had been made.
​February 2016	​Deputy S.Y. Mézec	​Nature of what the Deputy had written on his blog. The complaint was not upheld.
​February 2016	​Deputy S.Y. Mézec	​Nature of what the Deputy had written on a Facebook page. The complaint was not upheld.
​June 2016	​Deputy M. Tadier	​Nature of what the Deputy had written on a Facebook page and blog site. No action was taken as time had elapsed and no further complaint received.
​September 2016	​Deputy K.L. Moore	​Failure to respond to correspondence. The complaint was not upheld.
​October 2016	​Deputy S.Y. Mézec	​Nature of what the Deputy had written on his blog. The complaint was not upheld.
​February 2017	​Deputy S.Y. Mézec	​Nature of what the Deputy had written on various blog sites. The complaint was not upheld.
​July 2017	​Deputy S.Y. Mézec	​Nature of what the Deputy had written on a Facebook page. The complaint was not upheld.
​August 2017	​Deputy A.D. Lewis	​That the Deputy had ‘lied’ to both the States Assembly and the Independent Jersey Care Inquiry. The complaint was upheld. A vote of censure was recommended to the States. The States voted in favour of the vote of censure on 12th September 2017.

 This response has been issued on behalf of the States Greffe. The States Greffe is responsible for the information held by (and on behalf of) both itself and the States Assembly.  Neither the States Assembly nor the States Greffe form part of the Government of Jersey and the Government was not involved either in the examination and retrieval of any information required for this response, nor in the drafting of the response itself.​​