Source: https://dbfamilylaw.wordpress.com/2016/07/
Timestamp: 2018-06-20 01:32:32
Document Index: 503643490

Matched Legal Cases: ['UKSC ', 'UKSC ', 'UKSC ', 'EWCA ', 'UKHL ', 'UKHL ', 'UKHL ', 'UKHL ', 'Art 6']

July | 2016 | dbfamilylaw
In Al Rawi & Ors v The Security Service & Ors [2011] UKSC 34 [2012] AC 531 the Supreme Court held that the common law would not permit a closed material procedure. Such procedures can only be set up by express statutory provision (the Bank Mellat case proceeded under Counter-Terrorism Act 2008). European Convention 1950 and the right to a fair trial does not prevent closed material procedures, provided strict conditions are met. Lord Neuberger summarised those conditions in Bank Mellat (No 1) as follows:
[5] …Those conditions, in very summary terms, would normally include the court being satisfied that (i) for weighty reasons, such as national security, the material has to be kept secret from the excluded party as well as the public, (ii) a hearing to determine the issues between the parties could not fairly go ahead without the material being shown to the judge, (iii) a summary, which is both sufficiently informative and as full as the circumstances permit, of all the closed material has been made available to the excluded party, and (iv) an independent advocate, who has seen all the material, is able to challenge the need for the procedure, and, if there is a closed hearing, is present throughout to test the accuracy and relevance of the material and to make submissions about it.
In Re A (Sexual Abuse: Disclosure) [2012] UKSC 60, [2013] 1 FLR 948 (a vulnerable young adult witness confronted by an argument that her confidentiality should be breached so she could give evidence against a father in children proceedings) Lady Hale, confronted with a suggestion that closed material could be considered in that case, answered:
[34] It is in this context that it has been suggested that the court might adopt some form of closed material procedure, in which full disclosure was made to a special advocate appointed to protect the parents’ interests, but not to the father himself. It faces two formidable difficulties. The first is that this Court has held that there is no power to adopt such a procedure in ordinary civil proceedings: Al Rawi v Security Service (JUSTICE intervening) [2011] UKSC 34, [2012] 1 AC 531…. It is arguable that a greater latitude may be allowed in children cases where the child’s welfare is the court’s paramount concern. But the arguments against making such an inroad into the normal principles of a fair trial remain very powerful….
[34] … The essential requirement of any fair procedure is that the person who stands to lose his rights has an opportunity effectively to challenge the essence of the case against him. There may be cases in which this can be done by offering him a ‘gist’ of the allegations and appointing a special advocate to scrutinise the whole of the material deployed against him. In a case such as this, however, it is not possible effectively to challenge the allegations without knowing where, when and how the abuse is alleged to have taken place. From this information it is inevitable that X’s identity will be revealed. Even if it were theoretically possible to devise some form of closed material procedures, therefore, it would not meet the minimum requirements of a fair hearing in this case.
So where does that leave any proposal that there might be scope – albeit very limited – for closed material procedures in children proceedings? Al Rawi provides the starting point for consideration of any such procedure in civil proceedings. The case arose from a preliminary issue in a damages claim raised in proceedings where the claimants alleged that the security services had been complicit in the detention and ill-treatment of them by foreign authorities at various locations including Guantanamo Bay. The pleaded causes of action included false imprisonment, trespass to the person, conspiracy to injure, torture and breach of the Human Rights Act 1998. The state filed an open defence admitting certain uncontroversial facts, but also a closed defence which referred to material they wanted the court to consider; but to which they wanted to deny access to the claimants.
The Security Service, the defendants, said that the disclosure question could not be dealt with on ordinary public interest immunity grounds. They said there was so much material: this might take 3 years just to decide in respect of which material PII should be claimed. The judge said a closed material procedure was permitted. The Court of Appeal disagreed; and the Supreme Court disallowed the Security Service’s appeal from that decision (with Lord Clarke dissenting). In that case, and as a general rule in civil proceedings it was held that closed material procedures should not be permitted in the absence of statutory provision.
Use of closed material procedures in civil proceedings
Closed material procedures have been used to protect national security (eg cases cited so far in this article) and in proceedings before the Information Commissioner where sensitive information is required to be protected (Browning v The Information Commissioner & Anor [2014] EWCA Civ 1050, [2014] 1 WLR 3848). In a very narrow range of exceptional circumstances they may be ordered in children proceedings (and eg subject to the conditions referred to by Lord Neuberger in Bank Mellat (No 1) at [5] (above)). The starting point must always be to protect a party’s right to an open trial with all material available to him or her which will be considered by the court; and subject to rules of natural justice.
[10] There are certain features of a common law trial which are fundamental to our system of justice (both criminal and civil). First, subject to certain established and limited exceptions, trials should be conducted and judgments given in public. The importance of the open justice principle has been emphasised many times: see, for example, R v Sussex Justices, Ex p McCarthy [1924] 1 KB 256, at p 259, per Lord Hewart CJ, Attorney General v Leveller Magazine Ltd [1979] AC 440, at pp 449H-450B, per Lord Diplock, and recently R (Mohamed) v Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (No 2) (Guardian News and Media Ltd intervening) [2011] QB 218, paras 38-39, per Lord Judge CJ.
[12]… A party has a right to know the case against him and the evidence on which it is based. [and] he is entitled to have the opportunity to respond to any such evidence and to any submissions made by the other side. The other side may not advance contentions or adduce evidence of which he is kept in ignorance….
[13] … The parties should be given an opportunity to call their own witnesses and to cross-examine the opposing witnesses. As was said by the High Court of Australia in Lee v The Queen (1998) 195 CLR 594, at para 32: “Confrontation and the opportunity for cross-examination is of central significance to the common law adversarial system of trial.”
Lord Dyson was concerned to emphasise these points – none of them ‘controversial, he thought – because a closed material procedure, unlike public interest immunity, diverged from open justice and natural justice principles. He centred Parliament’s response to this on the prevention from terrorism legislation so far made:
[14] In recent years, both the courts and Parliament have been exercised by the problem of how to balance (i) the interest that we all have in maintaining a fair system of justice which, so far as possible, respects the essential elements of these principles and (ii) the interest that we also all have in the protection of national security, the international relations of the United Kingdom and the prevention, detection and prosecution of crime. Thus, Parliament has reacted to the threat of terrorism to our national security interests by introducing a form of closed material procedure (with the use of special advocates) for use in certain categories of case, for example, by enacting the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005 and the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008.
Thus a closed material procedure must be distinguished from public interest immunity. With closed material procedures the judge and certain parties (and perhaps special advocates for the parties kept out of the material) will see the sensitive material; but the excluded parties themselves will not. By contrast, in the case of public interest immunity only the party who has the documents has access to the information they contain. This is denied to other parties and to the court. The court therefore decides the case with only a part of the relevant evidence.
It is not in question that proceedings in relation to children are one of the exceptions to the open justice principle (Scott & Anor v Scott [1913] UKHL 2, [1913] AC 417; Administration of Justice Act 1960 s 12(1) etc). Hearings will almost invariably be in private even though an anonymised version of the judgement may be published. Closed material procedures go much further than privacy. Lord Dyson again (citing Lord Bingham):
[27] It is one thing to say that the open justice principle may be abrogated if justice cannot otherwise be achieved. As Lord Bingham of Cornhill said in R v Davis [2008] UKHL 36, [2008] 1 AC 1128 at para 28, the rights of a litigating party are the same whether a trial is conducted in camera or in open court and whether or not the course of the proceedings may be reported in the media. It is quite a different matter to say that the court may sanction a departure from the natural justice principle (including the right to be present at and participate in the whole or part of a trial). Scott v Scott is no authority for such a proposition.
[27] … How can such a step ever satisfy the requirements of justice? And if the court does have the power to deny a litigant this fundamental common law right, in what circumstances is it appropriate to exercise it? These are the questions that lie at the heart of this appeal.
And for Lord Dyson his conclusion, and his dismissal of the Government appeal (with varying degrees of enthusiasm all of the eight Supreme Court justices dismissed the appeal, save for Lord Clarke), was to refer back to in R v Davis [2008] UKHL 36, [2008] 1 AC 1128 and to hold:
[35] I return to the questions that lie at the heart of this appeal. In my view, the analogy with Davis is compelling. As I have said, the fact that Davis was a criminal case is not material. The issues considered were of application to trials generally. It decided that, subject to certain exceptions and statutory qualifications, the right to be confronted by one’s accusers is such a fundamental element of the common law right to a fair trial that the court cannot abrogate it in the exercise of its inherent power. Only Parliament can do that. The closed material procedure excludes a party from the closed part of the trial. He cannot see the witnesses who speak in that part of the trial; nor can he see closed documents; he cannot hear or read the closed evidence or the submissions made in the closed hearing; and finally he cannot see the judge delivering the closed judgment nor can he read it.
Exceptions to rule refusing closed material procedure
As a coda to his judgment Lord Dyson dealt with exceptions to his normal rule as to disallowance of closed material procedures. In agreement, he said, with the minority view of Lord Clarke, he said:
[63] … there are certain classes of case where a departure from the normal rule may be justified for special reasons in the interests of justice. Thus as Baroness Hale of Richmond said inSecretary of State for the Home Department v MB [2007] UKHL 46, [2008] 1 AC 440 at para 58:
‘If….the whole object of the proceedings is to protect and promote the best interests of a child, there may be exceptional circumstances in which disclosure of some of the evidence would be so detrimental to the child’s welfare as to defeat the object of the exercise.’
The same applies to commercial interests, where disclosure might ‘render the proceedings futile’ (para [64]). However, he went on:
[65] In my view, the children and confidentiality cases cannot be relied on to justify creating a rule of general application in ordinary civil litigation. These are two narrowly defined categories of case where a departure from the usual rules of procedure has been held to be justified….
Discretion in wardship to restrict disclosure to a party
In re K (Infants) [1965] AC 201 the House of Lords considered whether, in wardship proceedings, they were entitled to deny to a mother access to a medical report prepared for the Official Solicitor. They held that in his/her discretion a judge was entitled to deny access to information, in the interests of a child. Lord Devlin started from ‘the ordinary principles of a judicial inquiry’ (per Upjohn LJ in the Court of Appeal):
They include [said Lord Devlin] the rules that all justice shall be done openly and that it shall be done only after a fair hearing; and also the rule that is in point here, namely, that judgment shall be given only upon evidence that is made known to all parties. Some of these principles are so fundamental that they must be observed by everyone who is acting judicially, whether he is sitting in a court of law or not; and these are called the principles of natural justice. The rule in point here is undoubtedly one of those.
This is the essence of the matter. Where the judge sits as an arbiter between two parties, he need consider only what they put before him. If one or other omits something material and suffers from the omission, he must blame himself and not the judge. Where the judge sits purely as an arbiter and relies on the parties for his information, the parties have a correlative right that he should act only on information which they have had the opportunity of testing. Where the judge is not sitting purely, or even primarily, as an arbiter but is charged with the paramount duty of protecting the interests of one outside the conflict, a rule that is designed for just arbitrament cannot in all circumstances prevail.
Closed material procedures and a child’s welfare: how far?
[114] … once it is accepted, as Lord Dyson does (para 63), that “there are certain classes of case where a departure from the normal rule may be justified for special reasons in the interests of justice”, for example wardship and other cases where the interests of children are paramount, that to my mind also makes it difficult to suggest that the court lacks jurisdiction in a strict sense to vary the basic principles of open and natural justice mentioned in para 107 above.
Generally the courts should only permit closed material procedures where Parliament sanctions it – as with Justice and Security Act 2013. Otherwise in civil proceedings such procedures will only very rarely be justified; and those circumstances include children proceedings.
Justice and Security Act 2013 (JSA 2013) has nothing to do with family law; but the procedures under are looked at to the extent that they may be treated as analogous to proceedings in children proceedings. The exceptions from the right of a person to a fair trial in open court under European Convention 1950 Art 6 is as follows:
(1) … the press and public may be excluded from all or part of the trial in the interest of morals, public order or national security in a democratic society, where the interests of juveniles or the protection of the private life of the parties so require, or to the extent strictly necessary in the opinion of the court in special circumstances where publicity would prejudice the interests of justice.
children evidence, closed material procedures, disclosure, Justice and Security Act 2013, national security, special advocates	1 Comment