The language of the order provides for privacy at the hearing. It has nothing to do with secrecy as to the facts of the case.
The learned judge interprets it as enjoining such secrecy. He realizes that having done so he is logically compelled to put all hearings in chambers on the same footing, and he therefore declares that under the procedure of our Courts there is an absolute obligation to perpetual secrecy as to what passes at the hearing of all summonses in chambers. No one has ventured to say before us a single word in defence of this part of the judgment. It is not too much to say that it is ludicrously at variance with the actual practice. Many thousands of summonses in actions are heard in chambers in the course of each year, and
- respondent wife
- Mr Justice Mostyn:
- Preliminary comments
- Costs
- £5,401,503.
- Background facts
- former
- The wife’s application to be released from her undertaking
- Anonymity
- Mode of taking Evidence.
- The Judge Ordinary of the Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes may sit in Chambers.
- The Treasury to cause Chambers to be provided.
- Powers of Judge when sitting in Chambers.
- as if sitting in open Court
- The Registrars to do all Acts heretofore done by Surrogates.
- The language of the order provides for privacy at the hearing. It has nothing to do with secrecy as to the facts of the case.
- during all my experience at the Bar and on the Bench I have never heard it suggested that there is the slightest obligation of secrecy as to what passes in chambers. Everything which there transpires is and always has been spoken of with precisely the same freedom as that which passes in Court
- Beyond and besides this the Court acquires no power or jurisdiction over an individual by reason of his having become a litigant. He remains in all other respects as free and as independent of interference from the Court as he was before the suit was instituted or as any other member of the public is who has never been a litigant.
- the fact of his having been compelled to be a litigant cannot put him for all time in the position of being in statu pupillari to the judge before whom the cause has come
- , I rebel against the suggestion that according to English law he may do this only so far as it may accord with the notions of some judge who, as such, has no more authority to act towards him as a moral director in his behaviour in life after the suit is over than has the man in the street.
- The conception of the Court interfering with litigants otherwise than by granting the relief which it is empowered and bound to grant is wholly vicious and strikes at the foundation of the status and duties of judges.
- The serious encroachment on personal liberty which is here proposed is not supported by a single decision. There is on record no case where the Courts have asserted a right to control the personal acts of litigants after the conclusion of the suit except to enforce the relief granted.
- I cannot forbear adding that in my opinion nothing would be more detrimental to the administration of justice in any country than to entrust the judges with the power of covering the proceedings before them with the mantle of inviolable secrecy.”
- reporting
- unless derived from any part of the proceedings conducted in open court