By Christopher Booker

9:00PM GMT 02 Mar 2013

 Last week, 702 lawyers, including 38 QCs, signed a letter calling on the Government to drop its Justice and Security Bill, allowing judges to sit in secret on cases involving national security. According to the lawyers, allowing judges to hold their hearings behind closed doors would be “dangerous”, “contrary to the rule of law”, would “erode the core principles of our civil justice system” and would “fatally undermine” the right to a fair trial and open justice. What the lawyers did not say, however, was that we already have a devastating confirmation of all these points in the workings of our family courts, in too many of those tens of thousands of cases every year involving the removal of children from their parents by council social workers.

In reporting on many such cases, I have found nothing more shocking about the shadowy underworld of our family courts than to discover, precisely because they are allowed to hide themselves away behind a wall of secrecy, how easily the most basic principles of British justice can be turned upside down. Responsible parents can find themselves being treated like criminals, assumed to be guilty without having the chance to prove their innocence. Judges are too often happy to accept the controversial opinions of supposed “experts”, that cannot be challenged; or to take on trust highly dubious hearsay evidence which is not put to any of the tests required in a criminal court.

Faced with an array of lawyers on the other side, parents too often feel that the entire system is horribly rigged against them – and none of this can be directly reported, except at risk of the draconian penalties that, at a judge’s whim, can be imposed for contempt of court.

Last Wednesday I sat in the High Court listening to Gavin Millar QC, an eminent specialist in this field, asking a judge to lift an order he imposed on me in December that would have forbidden me ever to refer again to a case I have commented on here several times. So strict was this order imposed by Mr Justice Mostyn at the behest of Sutton council, the local authority, that I could have been sent to prison for even the slightest mention of the case. So far-reaching was the judgment accompanying his order that it would have extended the secrecy rules governing such cases far beyond even the strict limits that the law currently allows, making it virtually impossible for newspapers to report critically on child-protection proceedings at all.

Although everything I have written about this case, for instance, was careful to observe the existing law, as by never identifying any of the parties by name, it was argued that even the bare facts I was able to give about this disturbing story would have enabled anyone slightly acquainted with a member of the family to know at once who I was writing about. This in itself was not just implausible, but would undermine even the rule of anonymity which customarily governs the reporting of such cases.

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For an hour and a half, Mr Millar argued, with a parade of legal precedents, how the order was in breach of several articles of the Human Rights Act. So masterly was his presentation of relevant case law that he increasingly won Mostyn’s attention and respect, to the point where it was finally agreed that, on the basis of my commitment that I would report on the case “accurately”, the order could be lifted. In making the order, the judge had accepted Sutton’s claim that my reports on the case had been “totally inaccurate”. But since this had been merely asserted without the support of any evidence, we had not needed to challenge it, even though we would have been very ready to do so.

As a victory for common sense and the rule of law, the lifting of this order is of much wider significance than just my own case. An argument commonly levelled against my comments on such cases has been that I only listen to “one side of the story”. But, as I have noted before, I always try to understand both sides of such stories, with no help whatever from the local authorities, who not only invariably refuse to answer my questions, but also have several times sought injunctions forbidding me from making any mention of a case.

This was the first occasion on which a judge was persuaded to agree to such an order, and the fact that he was prepared to listen to the arguments and to lift it was a salutary victory for the freedom of the press.

This was certainly welcome as far as it went. But the battle to lift the veils of secrecy that shroud the “secret courts” we already have is very far from over, and behind those veils far too many cruel abuses of justice will continue to flourish unreported. At least, however, thanks to the forensic skills of Mr Millar, Wednesday was a good day for British justice.

The EU has no power to cap our City bonuses

One of the greatest puzzles of British politics is how little even our politicians and media seem to know about the weirdly remote system of government that now, in so many ways, rules over our lives. Recent weeks have brought a crop of further examples. How many people, for instance, understood that the real reason why our Government was so desperate to rush Parliament into voting for “gay marriage” was that it needed to meet a June deadline set by the Council of Europe?

Or that this followed a two-year lobbying campaign behind the scenes in Strasbourg led by an alliance between two British ministers, Theresa May and Lynne Featherstone, and gay pressure groups in Britain?

Again, while hysteria over horse meat fades away here, the Continental press continues to uncover dozens more examples of food fraud, involving meat, eggs, fish and heaven knows what, all made possible by the dysfunctional system of regulation imposed by the EU since it took over all “competence” to make food law in 2002.

Almost the only politician in Europe to understand this, as he discovered when he attended a meeting of EU farm ministers last week, is Owen Paterson. He has been valiantly trying to get Europol to co-ordinate an EU-wide investigation into this explosion of criminality, directly created by a system wide open to abuse, because it replaced on-the-spot inspections that could identify such fraud with a trail of paperwork. Everyone along this chain of paperwork, as food moves from one country to another, is expected by law to trust it. And now we have the furore over a supposed “EU ban” on giving excessive bonuses to bankers. Instead of huffing and puffing that this could destroy London as a world financial centre, David Cameron and Boris Johnson should have pointed out that this proposal is merely a recommendation by a committee of the European Parliament, claiming to use powers given to the EU by Article 53.1 of the Lisbon Treaty.

Had our Prime Minister and the London Mayor looked at Article 53.1, they would have seen that it relates solely to the rules governing “self-employed persons”. It has no relevance to bankers’ bonuses — indeed Article 153.5 makes clear that the EU cannot legislate on pay.

So the EU in this case has no “competence” to restrict bankers’ bonuses whatever, and could be taken to court for acting illegally if it tried to do so. It has been a grandstanding bid by a group of MEPs to catch the headlines. Instead of constantly looking in the wrong direction, isn’t it time a good many people went on a crash course to understand rather better the bizarre way in which we are now governed?

Democracy is gurgling down the plughole

When I spoke to Nigel Farage on the afternoon of polling day, his forecast of the Eastleigh by-election result turned out to be spot-on. But for all his understandable excitement over Ukip coming second, as it did last November in Rotherham — another by-election brought about by the disgrace of the previous MP — I’m afraid the most telling detail of Eastleigh was that its new Lib Dem MP won the votes of only 17 per cent of the total electorate, nearly half of whom stayed at home. In Rotherham, where the turnout was only 30 per cent, the new Labour MP got only 15 per cent of the potential vote.

The real sound we heard from Eastleigh was that of the bathwater of democracy gurgling further down the plughole. Just as much as all the publicity given to the antics of Chris Huhne, Denis McShane and Lord Rennard, the real story of these by-elections is that we are losing all faith in the political process.

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Reporter Christopher Bookers articles for the “Sunday Telegraph” on a certain case {these links stop Aug. 2011 – more articles exist} =
 
http://mauricejohnkirk.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/11-08-03-sunday-telegraph.pdf