Bureau Recommends: England’s hidden courtroom exposed
The inner workings of England’s most secret court has been exposed by the Guardian after the newspaper was granted unprecedented access.
The court of protection, which until last year automatically took place in private, is one of the most hidden corners of the justice system. The Guardian is the first media organisation to report from its courtroom.
It makes daily rulings about the lives and deaths of the most vulnerable people in the country, who are deemed to lack the capacity to decide their own personal welfare and finances.
Critics of the court have long argued that it makes rulings under a cloak of secrecy, too often siding with the state regardless of the litigants’ best interests.
Information obtained by the newspaper found that about 3,000 complaints out of 23,00 cases were made about the court in its first 18 months.
The court has seized £3.2bn worth of assets of those judged to be of insufficient mental capacity.
The head of court protection Sir Nicholas Wall told the Guardian that the court should be opened up to public scrutiny.
He said: ‘My entirely personal view is that provided we can protect the confidentiality of litigants and their families, there’s not a reason we can’t hear the cases in the presence of the media.’
