Meeting notes 22nd June 2021

NAP 5 – Open Justice – Wk 3 – Read out

by Guest

As part of the co-creation process of the UK’s fifth National Action Plan for Open Government (NAP5), thematic areas agreed to during the Multistakeholder Forum in March 2021 have been turned into biweekly Working Groups. These Working Groups bring together government policy leads and civil society, and are charged with developing commitments for inclusion in NAP5.

The third NAP5 Open Justice Working Group was held on June 10th, 2021 at 14:00 BST. The meeting was co-chaired by civil society and government.

The group was invited to a Mural board to prioritise the suggestions that arose out of the first two sessions. Suggestions that placed highly in both feasibility and impact included:

  • Improving speed and consistency of panel decisions relating to justice data
  • Proper judicial guidance and guidance to court staff about open justice to ensure consistency in application
  • Full government commitment to existing recommendations around open justice
  • Limited journalist access to the Digital Case System/Common Platform
  • Consistently published, online judgments while maintaining privacy
  • Improving quality of data collected and stored

The group was then invited to discuss the placements and the following points were made:

  1. Courts are approaching remote access through the lens of participants, not remote observers
  2. The need for strong guidance for court staff on remote access
  3. Journalist/Media accreditation issues
  4. Improvement of MOJ FOI response time
  5. A feasibility study of providing access to accredited journalists and observers to the digital document system in criminal courts

The next meeting will be held remotely on Monday, June 21st at 14:00.

For additional details or to get involved, please contact: