Freedom of Information
The press and public will have automatic access to court documents in judicial review cases following a High Court ruling.
The Times, The Financial Times and The Guardian brought the case after their request for access to a key court document was refused during the judicial review of the Serious Fraud Office’s decision to abandon its corruption probe into BAE Systems.
After proceedings were brought over this refusal, the document was provided but the newspapers continued the case to establish the point of principle of automatic access to such documents in judicial review proceedings.
In the third party application in R (Corner House Research) v Director of the Serious Fraud Office, the government argued that new rules introduced in October 2006, giving the public access to statements of case filed during court cases, did not apply to the summary.
it was anomalous that the rules applied to the claim form in such proceedings but not to the defendant’s documents.
In the absence of any principled justification, he said he would not hesitate to hold that the defendant’s documents were “defences” and were therefore covered by the new rules.
Olswang partner, Dan Tench, who acted for the newspapers, says: “The judge noted that the public interest in judicial review proceedings was if anything greater than that in private law proceedings and that there was no good reason to deny the same degree of public access to the key court documents.”
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