Court records are one of the major exemptions from the Freedom of Information Act. However, the Department for Constitutional Affairs was planning to introduce new which would make a much greater range of information about civil court cases available to the public (this would be outside the remit of FOI).
This DCA attempt to open up much court information has been blocked, by the . As journalists like to say, the case continues.
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A blog about freedom of information, written by the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's Martin Rosenbaum.
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Surely, the principle ought to be that anything which is said in a public hearing (and could have been published by anyone present) ought to be publicly available information.
Not all hearings are in public, and not all documents which are assembled for a case are eventually examined in court. Under the new rules, all of them will be capable of public access.
The Law Society has got a (temporary) injunction because the Court administration suddenly decided that the new rules apply to cases long since decided and disposed of, under the old rules which were quite different. This will be sorted out one way or the other in the near future, and so Martin Rosenbaum and Tom Griffin and others will then be able to trawl the court papers for whatever salacious tidbits or evidence of global conspiracies they think are hidden there. My own view is that crawling through the evidence of the venality, incompetence or idiocy of others gives a pretty bleak view of life, and that there are much better things to do with one's time.