A More Opaque British Government

LONDON â€" British governments sometimes seem inclined to offer unrequested advice to countries in the so-called developing world about their commitment to Western democracy. But in recent weeks, the question could be inverted: how open is British society itself

On two fronts, the British authorities have been pressing to restrict public access to and knowledge of judicial proceedings.

The first battle line was drawn when Foreign Secretary William Hague formally applied for parts of the inquest into the poisoning death of the former K.G.B. officer Alexander Litvinenko be heard behind closed doors, presumably to shield both Britain’s MI6 intelligence service and Britain’s relationship with Russia from scrutiny.

Then, last week, the government of David Cameron pressed ahead in the lower House of Commons to introduce legislation that would enable secret civil court proceedings in national security cases deemed to be too sensitive for public airing.

As Human Rights Watch observed last December when the parliamentary process got under underway, “the much criticized Justice and Security Bill would widen the use of secret hearings known as “closed material proceedings,” or CMPs, in the civil courts on national security grounds, excluding the person affected and their lawyer from the courtroom. Parts of the judgments would also be kept secret, meaning someone could be found guilty without being told what they were guilty of. Such hearings would undermine a basic principle of justice: the ability to know and challenge the case against you. A second part of the bill would also prevent disclosure of material showing the United Kingdom’s involvement in wrongdoing by other countries.”

Last week, the government defeated parliamentary efforts by the Labour opposition to build new safeguards into the bill. The Conservatives, the dominant partner in the gov! erning coalition, secured those victories with the help of many among the junior Liberal Democrats - but at some cost to the smaller party’s credentials as the guardian of civil liberties.

As I explore in my latest Page 2 column in The International Herald Tribune, almost three years of partnership with the Conservatives have challenged the Liberal Democrats to distance themselves self from their partners-in-government if they are to avert humbling setbacks at the 2015 national election.

But the party’s inner tensions became clear at the weekend at the Liberal Democrats’ spring conference, when two prominent members quit in protest at the party’s support for the proposed legislation on secret courts, which must now be debated by the House of Lords.

The upper chamber “ow has an opportunity to insist that judges be given more power to defend the interests of justice and that closed material procedures are a measure of last resort,” The Observer newspaper commented Sunday in an editorial. “Only the Lords can prevent what is, in effect, a perversion of the course of British justice.”