John Battle KC (Hons) is Head of Legal and Compliance at ITN and leads the broadcast cameras in court group. He is a member of the Bar Council's Ethics Committee.
The open justice principle is recognised as a significant foundation stone of our legal system: justice must be seen to be done as well as done. Yet in practice, until fairly recently, open justice has meant simply keeping the door of the court open to the public and no more.
But this century the open justice principle has moved to a new level, from just physical access to court buildings to actively supporting reporting of the courts, for example by allowing images shown in court, such as CCTV and documents, to be given to reporters and filming of sentencing hearings and appeals. This greater transparency is arguably the most significant change in our legal system of this modern era.
Key figures in the senior judiciary and legal system recognised the need to improve public understanding of the rule of law and the work of the courts and to challenge misconceptions that judges were out of touch and soft on sentencing. It was also recognised that in the digital information age the courts could fade from the public eye if court reporting itself waned.
The Supreme Court has been at the forefront of change, allowing filming and live streaming of its proceedings from the start. Its case law (particularly Cape Holdings v Dring (2019)) has also promoted openness, establishing a basic principle that a document shown in court can and should be disclosed to third parties such as the media, leading to changes in the civil and criminal procedure rules.
Following a long-running campaign by the news media industry, cameras were also allowed into court to film. Senior judiciary recognised the value of filming in the courts subject to controlled conditions, which led to filming first in the Court of Appeal (2013) and then of sentencing in the Crown Court.
Since 2022, more than 200 sentencing hearings have been filmed jointly by BBC, ITN, PA and Sky News and shown on television news, online and on radio, both live on news channels and in packaged news reports. The full sentencing remarks in every hearing filmed is posted online on the Sky News Courts channel and the statistics show the public are very interested in watching the full sentencing. Most Crown courts in England and Wales have now been filmed. Next year, filming is likely to be expanded to the Admin Court and to hearings involving the Chief Magistrate.
The 2008 CPS Media Protocol was another gamechanger, allowing images shown in court such as CCTV of the crime, interviews in the police station, and body-worn cameras showing arrest to be given to the media. Overnight this transformed court reporting – moving away from the pre-protocol news reports of court sketches, photos of court buildings and prison vans to a new era of court reports showing the same images the jury saw that day in the court – actual images of what happened. The protocol breathed new life into court reporting.
There is also now greater openness in the family courts and the Court of Protection through transparency orders allowing reporters into court to report, again subject to conditions.
Other initiatives include permitting reporters to post brief reports from inside the court from 2010, Judicial College guidance on when reporting restrictions should and should not be made, the 2022 HMCTS Reporters' Charter detailing the rights of the reporters as a stakeholder in the courts system, the Judicial Media Transparency Board's work on open justice issues, revised Bar Council rules clarifying when a barrister can disclose documents to the media and the Policing and Media Charter (2026), which endeavours to reset police/media relations and promote transparency and cooperation.
All these initiatives have moved the dial on openness, making the courts and justice system much more open, an example of how public institutions such as police, prosecutors and the courts can help the news media do its job, and thereby improve public understanding of their work.
The courts and judiciary have benefitted, promoting the rule of law and building public trust. Without openness it is difficult to build that trust. Judges and the courts have been seen to be doing their job well. Cries of secret justice have subsided and views that judges are out of touch, soft on sentencing and all from the same background have been challenged.
Moreover, these reforms have happened without any noticeable downside. There has not been a media circus or trials disrupted, as feared by some. The sky has not fallen down. It took a leap of faith to trust the media with court images, documents and to film in the courts. That trust has been respected, and the evidence is that greater openness works.
Find out more about open justice and court transparency during our panel "Sunlight on the system: what next for open justice?" at Bar Conference 2026.