My Lords, this amendment stands in my name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Lester of Herne Hill. It seeks to limit the televising of court proceedings to the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court. Your Lordships may recall that I expressed my view at Second Reading that cameras in the courts are a total folly except in very limited circumstances. I have no problem with filming proceedings in the Supreme Court or the Court of Appeal, where matters of law, principles of human rights or constitutional issues of long-term significance are debated and judged. However, it is a serious mistake to introduce cameras into criminal courts; this whole issue should be approached with caution. We are being persuaded that this is a very circumscribed use of cameras and the rationale is that it will bring transparency to, and increase confidence in, the justice system. I believe it will ultimately have the very opposite effect.
There has been lobbying for years to get cameras into courts. It should be recognised that television companies are not really interested in filming in the Court of Appeal or the Supreme Court. They want to get into the criminal courts or the libel courts—the places where the dramatic stuff of life is dealt with. They want rape, blood and gore. They want weeping victims, lying witnesses and unrepentant villains in the dock. They want to get into the courts where the salacious and the violent are dealt with in detail. They insist that they are interested only in transparency, when I am afraid that their real interest is voyeurism. In the same way that sex, drugs and rock and roll sell newspapers, they pull in viewing figures for television, too.
Court television in America made the man who introduced it a billionaire in no time, and lawyers and senior judges there would say that it drove down standards in the courts and decreased public confidence. The public in the end see edited snapshots of proceedings and think they have watched a trial; then they are vitriolic about how stupid the jury has been or how utterly stupid the judge has been.
An experiment was conducted in Scotland 20 years ago of filming a whole trial. Because Scotland is the one place in the United Kingdom where there is no law forbidding cameras, that was possible without any change in the law. The plan was abandoned when the senior legal profession in the whole of our nation saw the product and realised that there were very serious problems about fairness and enormous risks to justice. I would like our senior judiciary and politicians to go back to that footage and see why it is not a good idea.
This Bill does not ostensibly open the door of the courts to wholesale filming immediately. It is saying that cameras should be let into the higher courts and other courts, such as the criminal courts, for the giving of judgments and the passing of sentences. The public deserve, it is said, to know why a man got 10 years and not more; the public should see the judge passing sentences on criminals; people can cheer from their living rooms as crooks get their comeuppance; and they can knit like the tricoteuse at the guillotine as the judge says, “Take her down”.
However, the reality is actually damaging for justice. The Minister will no doubt say that there will never be filming of witnesses or jurors in cases, but I assure the House that while the intention now may be to stick to judges’ sentencing remarks, that is not the endgame sought by television programme-makers. We often talk of slippery slopes in this House but this one is a sheer drop. As soon as sentencing is covered on television, there will be complaints that the public did not get to see the defendant’s face when he heard his fate or that the remarks made little sense without hearing what the prosecution and defence lawyers had said in argument beforehand. So it will go on, with further and further encroachments sought.
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The question is asked: would it not be good for the public to hear and see a judge sentencing? I do not think that will satisfy anything. The sentencing remarks will be edited so that a snippet will be used as a headline on the news and the judge showing compassion will still be vilified by sections of the press, however good his reasoning. Some judges may even be tempted to avoid doing their bold but fair thing in looking, for example, at alternatives to prison when they see that camera at the back of the court. I also fear that some judges who miss the drama of the advocates’ arena will play up to the cameras in unhappy ways. Does any noble Lord in this Chamber remember Judge Pickles?
We should be concerned about the powers that we are delegating by virtue of this clause. The Joint Committee on Human Rights said in its report, by way of warning,
“the Delegated Powers Committee points out in its Report on the Bill, there is nothing on the face of the Bill to prevent the order-making power from being exercised in future to authorise the filming and broadcasting of witnesses, parties, crime victims, jurors or defendants. Indeed, granting such a wide authority”,
to the Lord Chancellor and the Lord Chief Justice to act together should be considered with caution. That authority, the report says,
“appears to be the Government’s intention: in its memorandum to the Delegated Powers Committee it suggested that if clause 23 is enacted, Parliament will have approved the principle of filming and broadcasting court proceedings. This led the Delegated Powers Committee to recommend that the affirmative procedure should apply to orders under clause 23(1), so that Parliament has an opportunity to apply a higher degree of scrutiny to an order setting out the extent to which filming and broadcasting should be permitted”.
We should be very mindful of the fact that our judges increasingly come under pressure to be more modern and to do the modern thing. Often, in pursuit of modernisation, we give away things that have worked sensibly and for a good reason.
The Government have asserted that the right to respect for private life in Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights would not be engaged because court proceedings are public. However, the Joint Committee on Human Rights report argued that this was,
“too simplistic given the range of very well established restrictions on reporting court proceedings, ranging from hearings in private through to anonymity orders, where the justification rests, in part at least, on the protection of aspects of a person’s private life. Indeed, one of the most important questions for Parliament about these provisions is whether relaxing the current restrictions on filming and broadcasting court proceedings which are anyway public is a justifiable interference with the right to respect for private life of those individuals involved in the proceedings”.
In the United States, they have discovered that no amount of explanation appeases the concerns of witnesses due to come before the courts. Because they know it will be televised, there is greater reluctance to participate in proceedings.
It is quite wrong that the television filming of court should be further expanded without it coming back before this House for proper consideration. I know that judges might argue that they can carefully fashion what they say and explain the reason for giving a particular sentence in a criminal case, but I am afraid that very often they will be made to sound ridiculous by the way their comments will be edited. Judges have also not realised that they will become much more visible. Currently, our judges can go about their business without fear for their safety; it is one of the great things about our system. They can shop in Waitrose, go to the garden centre at weekends or play golf and no one knows them from Adam or Eve. Their lives will become very different and much less secure once their faces can be played and replayed over and over again on new technology. I would like research to be done on the potential impact of these changes before we go down this road. For this reason, we should not today allow further use of cameras in courts beyond our appellate jurisdiction. I beg to move.