Starmer is right to say that “shining a light on the workings of the court room can only serve to boost its efficiency and effectiveness”. But before spending time and money opening up more courts to cameras, footage from the supreme court, which is already filmed at great expense, should be made more widely available.
I have suggested this before. It is a great shame that footage of this fascinating court, where important public issues are debated by our greatest advocates, is not more openly available. That footage, as well as most of the court’s business, is publicly funded. Hearings are recorded at great expense, but since the footage is only available on request to broadcasters, hardly any of it has been seen by the public.
Baroness Hale, one of the court’s 11 justices, has said that although the recordings are available to the media upon request, “they don’t often ask.” My view is that they don’t often ask because they think the public isn’t interested.
But the public isn’t interested because no broadcaster has presented the footage creatively enough to capture that interest. If the footage were made available in its raw form online, through a YouTube, Parliament TV or iPlayer type system, it would be for the public to decide how it wants to use the footage. Legal bloggers, who are mostly hobbyists, often do a better job of explaining judgments than the traditional media. Video editing software is now inexpensive: if the footage were in the public domain, an army of creative law aficionados and law educators could decide how to make it interesting.
Despite its multi-million pound refurbishment and excellent online press summaries, supreme court judgments are still poorly reported. For example, the Daily Mail recently took “woman judge” Baroness Hale to task for a ruling on domestic violence, and grossly misrepresented the case. Opening up the court footage will not prevent bad reporting, particularly in human rights cases which probably generate the worst examples, but it will enable more people to engage with cases for themselves in a format which they feel comfortable with. And it may also show the human face of judges, leaving them less open to unjustified personal attacks.
I am not the only one who thinks this is a good idea. Lord Neuberger, the head of the court of appeal and former member of the supreme court’s predecessor, said in March that while he can see why broadcasters, from a commercial perspective, are not keen to show the footage, nonetheless:
from a public interest perspective might there not be an argument now for its hearings, and some hearings of the Court of Appeal, being televised on some equivalent of the Parliament Channel, or via the BBC iPlayer. Brazil’s Federal Supreme Tribunal now has its own TV channel. The channel, TV Justiça, does not only show recordings of its sessions, but it also shows a whole host of educational programmes about the justice system.
So what is stopping the court? Apparently, it’s down to money. The court have recently added the following to their website’s frequently asked questions section:
We do not have the capacity to show our cases live on the website… It is extremely resource-intensive for us to convert our footage to domestic level DVDs or other output formats. Administering and fulfilling such requests is not possible within the Court’s current resources.
The DPP is correct that “transparency and visibility help the public understand how the criminal justice system works”. But before the Ministry of Justice begins another long and costly consultation exercise on televising other courts, it should provide the funding so the supreme court can, to paraphrase Jerry Maguire, show us the footage.
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Read more:
- Should justice be televised?
- There should be more QC on our TV
- Justice’s hidden backbone – a tribute to BAILII
