Jon Venables: the right to know

Jon Venables: the right to know

Justice cannot be served at trial unless Jack Straw holds his nerve on unmasking Jon Venables

Ken Macdonald

The problem about concealment in public life is that it leads to suspicion. This is very easy to understand, and the solution is equally clear: we should keep secrecy about affairs of state to a vanishing minimum.

And this is as true in justice as it is in politics. Broadly, daylight cleanses the work of the courts and the judges as much as it exiles corruption from the routines of government. Lawyers in the past have frequently sanctified confidentiality, but sometimes in ways that were painfully self-serving. And while not everything that happens in court can be revealed, we have obviously been too quick in the past to doubt any strength in a right to know.

Yet like the right to speak freely, the right to knowledge can never be absolute. If it were, the principle would quickly become threatening and tyrannical. It would destroy all privacy and savage the personal in ways we can only begin to imagine. Which of us believes in a right for others to know everything about our own lives?


n.b. Ken Macdonald is a former Director of Public Prosecutions