Secret justice: How Cameron and Clegg vowed to hand back our liberties but are instead planning illiberal changes to justice system

 
Daily Mail
8th January 2012
 

What a difference 19 months makes. Speaking in the sun-lit Downing Street gardens as he launched the Coalition back in May 2010, Prime Minister David Cameron promised it would be ‘committed to civil liberties and curbing the power of the state’.

Nick Clegg added that after years of Labour authoritarianism, theirs would be a government ‘that hands you back your liberties’.

Now, however, almost unnoticed, this same Government is planning to enact highly illiberal changes to the justice system.

If, as Mr Cameron intends, they become law later this year, the consequences will be an unprecedented growth of secret hearings in both civil court cases and inquests; to deny ordinary citizens the ancient Common Law right to challenge evidence against them; and to make it far more difficult to call wrongdoing by government agencies to account.

Greater secrecy in court would have a further by-product: the stifling of investigative journalism, for which information rev-ealed through the legal process is often critically important.

‘Many of the biggest recent scandals were exposed through a combination of journalism and litigation,’ says Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty. ‘These proposals would bring the shutters down for ever.’

The key points, set out late last year in a Green Paper on Justice and Security, include a sweeping power to allow Ministers to withhold evidence they deem ‘sensitive’ from any civil open court hearing or inquest, if the Minister thinks disclosure would cause ‘damage to the public interest’.

The courts would not be able to weigh such assertions against the need for open justice, while the terms ‘sensitive’ and ‘public interest’ are not defined.

But lawyers say the types of material that could be concealed are likely to embrace not only national security, but policing, relations with foreign governments, and government commercial contracts. In most cases, the Minister exercising this power would also be a party to the case – an extraordinary conflict of interest, which breaches another Common Law principle, that ‘no one shall be a judge in his own cause’.

The Green Paper also states that in cases where this ‘closed material procedure’ was invoked, the only person apart from the judge and the lawyers representing the Government who would be allowed to see the secret evidence would be a ‘Special Advocate’.

Read more: Secret justice: How Cameron and Clegg vowed to hand back our liberties but are instead planning illiberal changes to justice system
 

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