The British parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR) published its response on the 4 April to widely criticised “courtroom secrecy proposals”. The “courtroom secrecy proposals”, as the British government’s justice and security green paper is known, provide for a range of measures which the JCHR argues represent “a radical departure from the UK’s constitutional tradition of open justice and fairness”.
The Green Paper provides for an extension of “closed material procedures” so that they would be available in all civil proceedings. It would allow ministers to decide what material could be concealed from a range of interested parties including the media, the public and claimants. This would amount to a severe restriction of the rights of the media. As noted in the report of the JCHR, “the proposals in the Green Paper have significant implications for the freedom of the media to report matters of public interest and concern. Yet this important right does not feature in the Green Paper”.
The JCHR acknowledged that the government has legitimate concerns over national security and narrowed the proposals to those it considered necessary for the protection of national security. It noted that the common law allows for the removal of sensitive security evidence from proceedings on “public interest immunity grounds” and proposed that this procedure be improved although its usage must also be predictable.
You can read an article in the Guardian newspaper and another on the issue.
Click here to read a blog post for the UK Human Rights Blog.
Click here to read the report from the Joint Committee on Human Rights.