THE UK LABOUR Government has been accused of “making it harder for journalists to report the truth” after its decision to delete a court reporting database.

Courtsdesk is the UK’s largest court reporting database and over 1,500 journalists have used the platform – it also operates in Ireland. 

While the information related to court cases provided by the UK’s Ministry of Justice is often incomplete and difficult to navigate, Courtsdesk is designed to make it easier to find information.

Among its features, Courtsdesk provides a list of cases making their way through courts and lists plaintiffs, defendants, judges and upcoming court dates.

It was founded over a decade ago by Enda Leahy, who is a former deputy editor of The Irish Mail on Sunday.

However, the UK’s Ministry of Justice has ordered Courtsdesk to delete its database.

Speaking in the House of Commons yesterday, the Minister for Courts and Legal Services Sarah Sackman said Courtsdesk has yet to delete the information it holds.

Sackman said that under the previous Conservative Government in 2020, the UK entered into an agreement with Courtsdesk to repackage data held by the Courts and Tribunals Service in a “more accessible and easier to search form”.

However, she claimed that Courtsdesk “breached” this agreement by “sharing private, personal and legally sensitive information with a third-party AI company”.

“The Government takes our data protection responsibilities seriously,” said Sackman.

“It is for that reason that we decided to stop sharing data with Courtsdesk, a company that was prepared to put victims’ personal data at risk.”

Sackman also described this as a “data breach” but when she raised the issue with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), she was informed that “it did not meet the threshold for a referral”.

In a post on his Substack, Leahy said “we have always taken our responsibilities about Open Justice and custodianship of this information very seriously”.

He added that the “most important fact” is that the ICO concluded that the issue didn’t meet the threshold for a referral.

Meanwhile, Sackman said Courtsdesk “accepts that it has acted in breach of its agreement” but Leahy said this is not the case.

He added that Courtsdesk has written to the Ministry of Justice some 16 times since October and has yet to receive a “substantive reply”.

Leahy said Courtsdesk didn’t “share” data with an AI company but “hired them to test an idea”.

He also said that “every word of what they could do with the data was written down”.

“They could not use the data for any purpose other than providing services to us; they could not share it with anyone; and they could not use it to train any AI model.”

He said all of this information was related to the Ministry of Justice but that no response was received.

He added that the data is “automatically and permanently deleted every 24 hours” and that there is no database or archive.

‘Undermining journalism’

The issue was yesterday raised as an urgent question in the House of Commons by Conservative MP Kieran Mullan.

He accused the Labour Party of “wanting to make it harder for journalists to report the truth”.

Mullan pointed to a decision to scrap jury trials in England and Wales for crimes that carry a likely sentence of less than three years and remarked: “Can anyone draw any conclusion other than that they are determined to escape accountability for their damaging policies?”

Elsewhere, Liberal Democrat MP Jess Brown-Fuller remarked that just 4% of the court listings on the UK’s Courts and Tribunals Service are accurate.

“It is those gaps that Courtsdesk was designed to fill by providing clear and accurate information for reporters,” said Brown-Fuller.

“Doing away with this platform will naturally add to the feeling that the Ministry of Justice is avoiding difficult questions and dodging accountability by undermining journalism.”

Conservative Katie Lam meanwhile remarked that the data held by Courtsdesk “could be invaluable in uncovering the truth” and asked how “victims, survivors and any of us who care about the truth” can rely on the often inaccurate data provided by the UK Government.

The DUP’s Jim Shannon added that “justice should be open and transparent” and that “anything other than that is not democracy but, by its very nature, despotic”.