AN unprecedented attempt by the government to hold the first ever completely secret criminal trial in the UK has been blocked by the Court of Appeal.
The fact that the state and the government intended to hold a trial in secret, that was itself to be a secret, shows the intensity of the drive of the ruling class to abolish the basic rights that workers have won over many years, if not centuries of struggle.
The position that the capitalist state and government chiefs fought to establish was, in fact, creating the conditions for the abolition of Habeas Corpus.
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If a man, woman or child could be put on trial without anyone knowing – then it would be just a matter of time, and of the deepening of the capitalist crisis, before a situation arose where a person would be thought to be so dangerous to the state that he or she should be snatched in secret, tried in secret and then punished in secret, either in a secret prison or a secret grave.
This is what happened in recent history in Argentina under military rule. There, ‘desperate opponents’ of the military were picked up off the street, tried in secret, and then drugged and dumped into the sea from aeroplanes.
The emergence of death squads in the north of Ireland in the 1970’s, which had the permission of the UK government to torture and murder people, knocks on the head any stupid notion that it could not happen here.
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The Appeal Court not only banned keeping the trial a secret, it also ruled that the media should be allowed to name the defendants, in the case in question, they were Erol Incedal and Mounir Rarmoul-Bouhadjar.
The prosecutors said their unique application for a secret trial was in the interests of national security.
However the judges did rule that the core of the trial must be held in private. The judges said that the media and public would be allowed to attend the swearing-in of the jury, parts of the prosecution’s introductory remarks setting out the case, the verdicts and, where there are convictions, the sentencing.
As an extra concession the court added that a small number of journalists could be allowed to attend the closed parts of the trial, subject to agreement relating to the confidentiality of the proceedings. Their notes would be securely stored until the end of the trial.
This, however, will allow anonymous statements from unnamed secret state agents, too deep in an organisation to be named or identified, or paid informers alleging all kinds of actions that will be used to put people away for decades.
Lord Justice Gross said: ‘Open justice is both a fundamental principle of the common law and a means of ensuring public confidence in our legal system.
‘Exceptions are rare and must be justified on the facts. Any such exceptions must be necessary and proportionate. No more than the minimum departure from open justice will be countenanced.’
He said that those exceptions could include withholding information on the basis of national security because that was ‘a national interest of the first importance’.
This is a ‘catch all’ statement where evidence can be brought in secretly from state agents or provocateurs and then treated as fact.
Justice Gross said: ‘For the secret intelligence agencies to operate effectively, at least much of their work is secret and must remain so as a matter of necessity. From time to time, tensions between the principle of open justice and the needs of national security will be inevitable.’
The national interest of the bosses and the bankers is is of course primary for the ruling class. The Court of Appeal then ruled that the judges may review the need for continued secrecy at the end of the trial!
A spokesman for the attorney general, that is the government, was unrepentant. He said: ‘The measures applied for by the CPS in this case were, they believed, justified in order for the trial to proceed and for the defendants to hear the evidence against them while protecting national security.’
In other words achieving secret trials that are themselves secret remains the objective of the government.
Faced with the outright dictatorship sought by the government or the creeping dictatorship of the judges, the working class has only one way forward.
This is a socialist revolution to smash the capitalist state and bring in a workers state and socialism.