The left-wing Labour government in Britain is facing accusations of seeking to cover up what is going on inside the criminal justice system by deleting one of the largest court records archives.
The Ministry of Justice has ordered Courstdesk to delete its court records archive, which journalists and media organisations have used to inform the public about crimes in their communities.
The organisation said it has been used by over 1,500 journalists from 39 media organisations since it was created in 2021 under the previous Conservative government, in a bid to “improve coverage of the courts by the news media”.
Courtsdesk said it had discovered the media was not informed about hearings for two thirds of all standard cases, and that merely 4.2 per cent of court cases were listed accurately, meaning journalists were not able to inform the public about criminal cases in the vast majority of instances.
Chief executive for the firm, Enda Leahy, told The Times of London: “We built the only system that could tell journalists what was actually happening in the criminal courts.
“We wrote 16 times asking for dialogue. Last week we got our answer: delete everything. If the government were interested in open justice, they would engage in a dialogue.”
Shadow Home Secretary for the Conservative Party Chris Philp, who was behind the government efforts to establishment, described the decision to delete the archive as a “cover up”.
“These courts records contain data on crimes committed by illegal immigrants & data on the rape gang scandal. Yet the government wants to delete it all. They have learnt nothing,” he said.
Others also raised the issue of transparency surrounding crims such as the mass rape of English girls by predominantly Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs.
Conservative MP Katie Lam said: “To know the truth about the grooming gangs, we must have access to court records, at every level. The culture of secrecy in many of our institutions helped cover up these crimes in the first place.
“Labour must not be allowed to do this. The public deserves to know the truth.”
Adam Wren, the director of the Open Justice UK group, which advocates for greater transparency in the legal system, said that “court reporting is dead” in Britain with the move.
He said that previously newspapers had dedicated court reporters who built up relations within the judicial system, but now they have mostly retired and have not been replaced as media budgets have waned. Therefore, he said that most crime reporters have become dependent on listings through firms such as Courtdesk, but “the government is killing that too.”
The move comes in the wake of the Labour government rolling out plans to remove the right to a jury trial in most cases excepting the most serious crimes such as murder, manslaughter, rape, and terrorism, in favour of justice handed out by a single judge.
Critics have warned that removing the ability to appeal to ones peers will enable the government to impose more authoritarianism on the public, particularly in areas such as free speech, with over 12,000 already being arrested every year for comments made online.
Commenting on the latest development, frequent critic of the British government and the owner of the X social media platform, Elon Musk remarked: “The UK has become Orwell’s worst nightmare.”
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