Author Archives: Lewis James Brown

Lewis James Brown

The Independent View: National security is paramount but ‘secret courts’ are an illiberal attack on British justice

By Lewis James Brown | Tue 29th January 2013 - 12:05 pm

Supreme Court - Some rights reserved by cphoffman42In September 2012, the Liberal Democrat Conference voted overwhelmingly against the most contentious aspect of the government’s Justice and Security Bill – the extension of ‘secret courts’, otherwise known as Closed Material Procedures (CMPs), into civil courts.

This would allow ministers to submit a CMP application to a judge that material relating to national security be withheld from the defendant/claimant and their legal team despite being used as evidence. As Andrew Tyrie MP and Anthony Peto QC explain in “Neither Just nor Secure”, published today by the Centre for Policy Studies, this is worrying because “in an adversarial system such as the English one, the right to know and challenge the opposing case is not merely a feature of the system, it is the system”.

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