Author Archives: Lewis James Brown

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

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”.

Posted in The Independent View | Tagged , , and | 3 Comments
Advert



Recent Comments

  • Stephen Glenn
    Willie I would love there to be a world in which those of us who stand up and defend trans rights can disagree well with those who are gender critical. The p...
  • Michael KilpatrickMichael Kilpatrick
    It has just been intimated to me that the working group for this paper were expressly forbidden from considering further taxation changes in conjunction with th...
  • Mary Regnier-Wilson
    To be clear when I say there are things that we should be discussing a society, I mean things like how we ensure sex and relationship education doesn’t exclud...
  • Andrew Hickey
    "I’m a liberal and a contrarian, when everyone is agreeing with each other I want to start poking holes." That must be very nice for you, to be able to t...
  • Mary Regnier-wilson
    This post may well have been perfectly valid 10 years ago. There are things to be discussed as a society about how we as a society deal with a growing number of...