Government Orders Deletion of UK’s Largest Court Reporting Archive
The Ministry of Justice is ordering the deletion of a large archive of court records, raising concerns that the Government is fleeing from transparency over failings in the justice system amid a string of murders and sex attacks by asylum seekers. The Times has the story.
Courtsdesk, a data analysis company that supports media and campaigners in monitoring court records, has been ordered by the Government to delete its archive, which provides a crucial tool for journalists covering the justice system.
The project was approved by the Lord Chancellor in 2021 to explore how a “national digital news feed of listings and registers can improve coverage of the courts by the news media” by opening up magistrate court records.
According to Courtsdesk, the platform has since been used by more than 1,500 journalists from 39 media organisations and the data provided have highlighted serious failures in the courts system. …
In November, HM Courts and Tribunal Service (HMCTS) issued the company a cessation notice, citing what it called “unauthorised sharing” of court data, on the basis of a test feature, claiming this was a “data protection issue”.
When the company wrote to the department asking for the matter to be referred to the Information Commissioner’s Office, which regulates data protection, it says no referral was made.
Chris Philp, the former justice minister who approved the pilot and now Shadow Home Secretary, wrote to Sarah Sackman, the Courts Minister, demanding the decision be reversed.
Last week the government issued a final refusal, meaning the archive must now be deleted within days. …
Enda Leahy, the Courtsdesk chief executive and a former legal affairs correspondent at the Sunday Times, said: “We built the only system that could tell journalists what was actually happening in the criminal courts.
“HMCTS’s own data proves they can’t do it — their records were accurate 4.2% of the time, 1.6 million cases were heard without any advance notice to the press.”
Worth reading in full.
Reacting to the news, Daily Sceptic Associate Editor Laurie Wastell said:
We know that the British state always wants to bury the truth about the grim realities of multicultural Britain. Now, in the midst of an appalling series of murders and sex attacks by asylum seekers, the Ministry of Justice is ordering a major court-reporting platform relied on by journalists to delete much of its data. This stinks of yet another coverup.
Stop Press: US Under Secretary of State Sarah B. Rogers has tweeted in opposition to the move: “Transparency is essential to rule of law. Democracies should not order court records purged. This is basic, and obvious.”
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As Winston explained to Julia:
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
This is eerily similar to the modus operandi of our contemporary left, especially wrt the rewriting of history to make it more useful to woke ideology.
I am at the point where I regard ALL left wingers to be enemies of the state. Enemies of the state are traitors. I’m sure we can all work out the rest.
You are not the only one.
https://alt-market.us/its-time-to-accept-that-civil-war-2-0-has-already-started/
When important people are telling important lies they don’t want anyone interrupting with the truth.
Much like the Online Safety Act.
You say “asylum seeker”, I say “illegal immigrant”.
I say “alien invader”!
It’s actually irrelevant what we label them. If they’re committing rape and murder this needs to be public knowledge. I can’t help but suspect that the problem is much worse than is being reported by any media outlet, as an analysis of court records would likely demonstrate (and as would be revealed to any journalist who cared to delve into them!)
Fahrenheit 451, anyone?
STOP SPECULATING! THE GOVERNMENT ONLY HAS YOUR WELFARE IN MIND AND ACTS TRANSPARENTLY AT ALL TIMES. pesky databases
Hello is that Courtsdesk? This is Marcus from YourPenDrive.com. We currently have a great offer on 256GB USB sticks which I would like all your employees to benefit from!
“Ministry of Justice…” Pull the other one. And can we please have Starmer sacked already?!
Don’t address the problem, just stop people finding out about the problem.
Speaking of ”the grim realities of multicultural Britain”, this poor man who converted to Christianity from Islam recounts some of what he’s suffered at the hands of Muslims. This is what you’d expect in a majority Muslim country, with the ongoing persecution of religious minorities, not in a country such as the UK. Shame on Bradford police for being so bloody useless;
‘Sharia has no place in Western civilisation in the 21st century.’ Christian convert Nissar Hussain speaks out after being forced into hiding and subject to a ‘brutal attack’ in Bradford for leaving Islam.;
https://x.com/AzatAlsalim/status/2020845808262738002
Apologies for the reply without relation to your comment but here’s a Wikipedia link about a person I think you’d like to know about in case you don’t already: The women who developed the foundations of modern software development.
Not usually celebrated by the left because they don’t like the uniform.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper
Thanks for that. Had a read. I think I’ve heard of her but possibly it’s just because you’ve mentioned her in previous posts. I definitely don’t move in these circles.
😮 What an extremely brainy and accomplished lady. I felt intimidated just reading the first paragraph! 🙂
Yes she was instrumental in a
precursor to COBOL which was the first programming language I learned
That’s just the technical part. Her main contribution was that she managed to see the forest while all of her male colleagues were overwhelmed with all the trees, that is, busy with hand-optimizing machine code (cf The Story of Mel).
To use a real world example: According to Eric S. Raymond, Seymour Cray was the pinnacle of real programming because he once programmed an operating system of his own design into a computer by using the front-panel switches to enter octal number and it worked. Grace Hopper was the woman who didn’t (or at least stopped) and because of this, advanced software technology much further than Cray ever could.
[This was triggered by stupid statement of the German minister for labour and social affairs, Bärbel Bas, that we have a problem with men programming algorithms and thus, need feminist computer science [my words]. Problem with men programming algorithms is obviously code language for We must urgently censor internet communication more heavily because of reasons, the usual ones.]
Good point – I am terribly ignorant on the history of computing and programming languages but wasn’t COBOL, which she inspired, one of the first (if not the first) human readable languages?
Good description in her own words:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/800025.1198341
Thanks for that – a good read.
It’s no wonder the MoJ don’t want journalists delving into court records given the UK justice system’s track record allowing human rights lawyers to merrily acquit foreign criminals of the heinous charges that have rightly been brought against them.
This latest move paves the way for illegal immigrants to continue their wave of random violence, for more of them to come, and for the nation to remain blissfully ignorant.
Plus the removal of trial by jury for some cases. The fact that the masses can’t see the threat is mindboggling but not unexpected.
The purge ties in with the Home Secretary’s assertion that the grooming gang epidemic WAS a problem. If you destroy all the court reporting records no-one will be able to gainsay the claim.
The article probably needs to make the section about it been a pilot a little clearer. The pilot was deemed not to be successful on what most of us would consider rather dubious reasons. It wasn’t that it didn’t deliver the expected functionality – from what I can tell it was pretty successful in delivering the “elevator pitch” of allowing journalists much easier access to court proceedings. It was deemed not successful due to “data protection” issues in a test feature. GDPR is often used as a blocker.
The conspiracy theory would be that it was too successful as it allowed journalists to start spotting embarrassing trends and question the narrative.
Once upon a time, every regional newspaper would have court reporters. But they had to attend court every day to find what was going on. That doesn’t work for the WFH model and who could afford it anyway.
This is truly sinister.
Cross reference with changes to trial by jury.
“One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.” Brave New World. Sounds like all the dystopian novels are reaching their climax right now on our very doorstep.
How could this possibly be anything other than a nakedly brazen act of classic paranoid authoritarianism?
Quite – pause the service and fix the (possible) GDPR problem, not delete the data. GDPR is often used as an excuse. It’s not a very effective bit of legislation.
Someone with the technical ability needs to make a copy the entire database before the Government expunges the record of the multi-cultural disaster this and previous Governments have inflicted on the nation.
Pretty sure this will happen. It’s probably backed up in the cloud along with all the company’s other data. People think it’s easy to delete bits of a backup – it’s not! I can’t recall any of the common backup tools allowing this. Veeam certainly can’t and neither could Backup Exec back in the day.
Maybe the case. But the backed up data isn’t going to be available to journalists, or perhaps only pending a FOIA request, but most journalists will just consider the data to be unavailable to them… and that is probably the intent.
I wonder what they are scared of? Good, they seem to be panicking.
Deleting records is the actions you’d expect from a corrupt and seedy Arthur Daley organisation.
As Laurie Wastell says… This should not happen in a democracy!
There’s also a photo of a truck that shreds paper next to 10 Downing street.
What else is Starmer deleting
That’s his credibility being shredded.
Are you certain he had any?
Banana republics take the same actions to cover up the truth. This action must be fought at every level.
No department of government, the Ministry of Justice included, has the authority to order any company to do anything. Remember they work for us, not vice versa. Any given minister within the MoJ is equal to any other member of the public under the law, therefore the minister involved in the decision simply cannot just order the CEO of Courtdesk to do anything with the data kept by his or her company.
They are not there to tell us what to do!