Judges support open justice
Lady chief justice announces transparency board and praises reporters
The lady chief justice of England and Wales has announced details of a new transparency and open justice board.
Baroness Carr of Walton-on-the-Hill said its aim would be to examine and modernise the courts’ approach to open justice. Taking account of wider changes in society as well as changes implemented by the judges, it will set objectives for courts and tribunals to ensure timely and effective access to listing, documents and public hearings.
The board would also look at a “careful” expansion of court broadcasting. But judges would need to consider the effect that this might have on the parties and any adverse effects broadcasting might have on the administration of justice, public trust and confidence in the courts. Changes in legislation would be needed — as well as increased funding.
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Addressing the Society of Editors at its 25th annual conference yesterday, Carr said the new board would consider ways of making online attendance at hearings easier. She told journalists they would have advance information about hearings, “so you know which proceedings are being heard, and where and when”.
The board’s membership was announced yesterday. Its members are mostly senior judges from across the judiciary. There are no working journalists among them but the board’s terms of reference require it to establish a stakeholder committee which will presumably include media representatives.
Board members would look at what could be done to increase public and media access to the courts, the lady chief justice said. It was as important that the courts should be open to the press as it was that they should be open to the public.
Carr reminded her audience that if judges were proposing to impose reporting restrictions then reporters on the press bench could always ask to address the court:
If they have a well-founded challenge to the imposition of restrictions, there is no reason why they cannot stand up and request permission to explain the nature of their challenge.
A well-founded point, respectfully put, would seem to fall within the accountability role that you play. It is one of the ways in which, as Bentham put it, you keep judges on trial while they are trying.
I tried that myself in a recent case — and Carr immediately ruled in favour of the media.
The lady chief justice sounded a note of warning:
It is all too easy to target judges, their private lives or their families to make personal criticisms of them arising from their judgments when what they are doing is conscientiously and properly giving effect to their judicial oath.
Simply put, such an approach is not acceptable. Judges are entitled to respect for their private lives like anyone else. And, as importantly, such an approach does nothing to advance public debate on the issues. It fails as an effective means of holding the justice system to account.
But Carr said she was a firm believer in the fundamentally important role that a free, robust, high-quality and rigorously independent local, regional and national press had in our civic society.
She continued:
It is that role that I would very much like to see strengthened and invigorated in a legal context, particularly where the local and regional press are concerned, so that it can continue its crucial role in scrutinising the justice system as well as it does the other branches of the state.
We have only to see, for instance, the work of journalists such as Nick Wallis in bringing to light matters concerning the Post Office scandal. Or the work of Joshua Rozenberg, the legal journalist who has done so much to make the law clear and accessible to all, to increase public understanding of the issues and to promote informed debate. This makes us all appreciate the truly important role that journalism and the media, at its best, plays in society.
Joshua kindly invited me to participate in his final edition of Law in Action, after 40 years. This gave me the opportunity to cast my mind over that period… And it also gave me the opportunity to pay tribute to Joshua’s contribution to the legal world, and the public’s understanding of it.
As I wasn’t at the conference myself yesterday, I can’t report how well this went down with the 175 editors present whom Nick (praised a second time by Carr) and I don’t work for.
Three points spring to mind.
First, and at the risk of sounding like Cato the Elder – a most unpleasant person to sound like – who is going to meet the cost of providing the material? Hint: not the litigants and not the public purse. To be sure, if it’s just an electronic bundle and the solicitor of whom it is asked is CERTAIN that no redaction is required, the question may not arise: but in any other case the requester must pay, and pay up front on a scale laid down. If anyone disagrees I would like to know why.
Second, if high-profile work moves away from London to jurisdictions where courts are not treated as a source of cheap and sensational copy for the media – you read it here early if not quite first.
And third: I have on a number of occasions in my career – 43 years in articles and qualified – recommended arbitration precisely because it is private. There is nobody you can ask and who has to tell you where and when it is happening or indeed whether it is happening at all; you can’t ask anyone for the bundles; the results are not accessible. How long before the media ask for all that to change?
I fear I agree with Celia Kitzinger. BUT: 1. I am exceedingly pleased that both Joshua and Nick Wallis have received such resounding and richly merited praise from such an exalted quarter. Whilst never having had the privilege of meeting Nick Wallis for quite some years I was regularly encountering Joshua when undertaking representative work for the Solicitors’ profession when focused on the Law Society’s “honest broker” work.Our regular encounters spoke volumes of his work rate- he was always there, always probing, always courteous and thoughtful.
2. Yet again is there a reference to more online hearings. Even if I am now virtually alone in counselling so anxiously against more or less all hearings being remote I feel compelled to warn of the -yes- unnatural and impersonal nature of more or less invariable second best hearings and communications. How to judge honesty, hesitant utterances, communication at an arm’s length through a second or third language anywhere near to as accurately and fairly as face to face? How inaccurate and dismissive it is to insist that second hand remoteness of exchanges is just the same as conventional! That mischief alone needs to stop.
3. I always beware of “missionary work” , that is, where professional groupings believe that THEY know what the poor, inadequate dears of civilians NEED without actually ASKING THEM because after all what do they know? There is in my view that serious bit of conceit that can so often creep in.