What do Apple and Prince Harry have in common? No, I’m not about to make a bad joke. Yes, I’m aware that one is a tech giant and the other is fifth in line to the throne. However, both are involved in cases that found themselves advancing the all-important principle of open justice this week.
Let’s start with Apple. Despite widespread media coverage that Apple was taking legal action to overturn a demand by the government to access users’ data if required, neither party has publicly confirmed the dispute.
On Monday, it was confirmed by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal. Not only that, the government wanted the row to be kept secret. The government asked that a hearing on 14 March not be publicly listed. The tribunal refused, reminding everyone that the bar is set extraordinarily high (and rightly so) when it comes to asking the court to depart from the principle of open justice.
‘It would have been a truly extraordinary step to conduct a hearing entirely in secret without any public revelation of the fact that a hearing was taking place. That would be the most fundamental interference with the principle of open justice. It would require a correspondingly compelling justification. We do not rule out the possibility that there may be exceptionally rare cases where such a step can be justified. On the evidence, this is not such a case,’ tribunal president Lord Justice Singh and Mr Justice Johnson said in their nine-page judgment.
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On Tuesday, Prince Harry arrived at the Royal Courts of Justice to appeal a decision to downgrade his security arrangements. While day one was held in ‘open court’, proceedings on day two (ie today) would enter ‘closed session’ around 11.30am.
Master of the rolls Sir Geoffrey Vos told the parties and the hundreds watching the live stream on YouTube that the court bundles contained different levels of confidentiality. ‘We will have one level of confidentiality, namely confidential and open,’ Vos said.
‘We accept some aspects of the evidence in this case cannot be made public. That is the part of the hearing that needs to be in private. But it does not detract from the fundamental principle that court hearings in this country are held in public. We should like to see as much as possible of the legal and factual argument undertaken in open session with suitable caution being exercised by the advocates to ensure confidential material is not disclosed. I just wanted to be clear before we start about the importance of the open justice principle.’
Hear, hear.
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