Hundreds of lawyers attack secret trial plans
More than 700 lawyers have signed an open letter calling on the government to drop its ‘dangerous and unnecessary’ plans to extend closed material procedures (CMPs).
The letter, published in today’s Daily Mail, says that the proposals for secret courts set out in the Justice and Security Bill are ‘contrary to the rule of law’ and ‘erode core principles of our civil justice system, including the right to a fair trial… and open justice’.
The letter adds that the procedures will ‘fatally undermine’ the courtroom as a forum in which allegations of wrongdoing can be fairly tested and the government ‘transparently held to account’.
Closed proceedings were designed in response to claims by the security services that other countries will be unwilling to share intelligence with the UK if intelligence might later be disclosed in open court. It is proposed that CMPs will hear cases entirely in private, with no defendants or claimants present.
The latter will not know or be able to challenge the case against them and will be represented by a security-cleared special advocate, not their own lawyer.
CMPs are currently used in a small number of immigration and deportation hearings, but the government wants to extend them across the civil courts in cases believed to involve national security.
Law Society president Lucy Scott-Moncrieff told the Gazette last month that CMPs undermine an essential principle of justice, which is that all parties are entitled to see and challenge all of the evidence relied upon before the court, and to combat that evidence by calling evidence of their own.
The Society insists that the government has failed to make a national security case for extending CMPs to ordinary civil litigation.
Comments
No smoke without fire
I'm with the government on this one - it really sticks in the craw that people should be paid compensation for alleged injuries allegedly caused by the security services when the defence cannot safely produce evidence to rebut the claim. no doubt some claims will be justified - and I have every confidence in the independence of our judges, and the integrity of the security cleared advocates, to ensure that justice is done.
Old Lag
Good for you, Old Lag, it's time someone came out and made the point that we should trust the government, the judiciary and the advocates.
We know that the wrong people never get prosecuted is false; that it is a lie to suggest that evidence which should be disclosed to the defence is sometimes suppressed and that no senior judge ever said that rather than see the British justice system impugned he would prefer it if a few innocents remained in prison, or words to that effect.
So go for it, get out there and support what many silly billies fear might be a thin wedge end.
Correction
Good for you, Old Lag, it's time someone came out and made the point that we should trust the government, the judiciary and the advocates.
We know that the wrong people never get prosecuted; that it is a lie to suggest that evidence which should be disclosed to the defence is sometimes suppressed and that no senior judge ever said that rather than see the British justice system impugned he would prefer it if a few innocents remained in prison, or words to that effect.
So go for it, get out there and support what many silly billies fear might be a thin wedge end
Secret Injustice
Secret trials are not justice, but oppression. If the prosecution - except in the most exceptional of circumstances - cannot produce the evidence in open court, then that evidence is at best suspect and, for all we know, fabricated.
Such legislation removes government and its organs even further from public scrutiny and must NOT be permitted. Would Ian Tomlinson's killer have been brought to trial, I doubt it. Would the circumstances of Christoper Alder's death have been publicised? Doubtful. Would we be on the verge of the truth of the Hillsborough disaster? Most certainly we would not.
secret trials
how strange these lawyers, the govt must be laughing.
do they not know about bench memorandum /memoranda - used more and more now in the RCJ and outside.
a secret judgement used in civil proceedings whcih is not disclosed in civil proceedings but is in criminal proceedings hardly open justice. approved by the law society as the practice first got ventilated in Parker v Law Society and the barrister for the Law Society [later head of the bar] argued that it was fine and dandy.
as usual the govt just following and codifying current practice in the excecutive and the courts.
we are heading towards a democratic soviet union style country but imagine the outcry if this was the practice in some right wing dictatorship.