alt Hacker NewsMinistry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database
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Confused what to make of the comments here. Access to court lists has always been free and open, it's just a pain in the ass to work with. The lists contain nothing much of value beyond the names involved in a case and the type of hearing
It's not easy to see who to believe. The MP introducing it claiming there is a "cover up" is just what MPs do. Of course it makes him look bad, a service he oversaw the introduction of is being withdrawn. The rebuttal by the company essentially denies everything. Simultaneously it's important to notice the government are working on a replacement system of their own.
I think this is a non-event. If you really want to read the court lists you already can, and without paying a company for the privilege. It sounds like HMCTS want to internalise this behaviour by providing a better centralised service themselves, and meanwhile all the fuss appears to be from a company operated by an ex-newspaper editor who just had its only income stream built around preferential access to court data cut off.
As for the openness of court data itself, wake me in another 800 years when present day norms have permeated the courts. Complaining about this aspect just shows a misunderstanding of the (arguably necessary) realities of the legal system.
Better overview of what the complaint was here:
https://www.tremark.co.uk/moj-orders-deletion-of-courtsdesk-...
They raise the interesting point that "publicly available" doesn't necessarily mean its free to store/process etc:
> One important distinction is that “publicly available” does not automatically mean “free to collect, combine, republish and retain indefinitely” in a searchable archive. Court lists and registers can include personal data, and compliance concerns often turn on how that information is processed at scale: who can access it, how long it is kept, whether it is shared onward, and what safeguards exist to reduce the risk of harm, especially in sensitive matters.
Seems quite absurd that they would shut down the only system that could tell journalists what was actually happening in the criminal courts under the pretext that they sent information to a third-party AI company (who doesn’t these days). Here’s a rebuttal by one of the founders i believe: https://endaleahy.substack.com/p/what-the-minister-said
The title appears to be somewhat misleading.
The counter claim by the government is that this isn't "the source of truth" being deleted but rather a subset presented more accessibly by a third party (CourtsDesk) which has allegedly breached privacy rules and the service agreement by passing sensitive info to an AI service.
Coverage of the "urgent question" in parliament on the subject here:
House of Commons, Courtsdesk Data Platform Urgent Question
Interesting tweet on the topic here: https://xcancel.com/SamjLondon/status/2021084532187775244
> ... the agreement restricts the supply of court data to news agencies and journalists only.
> However, a cursory review of the Courtsdesk website indicates that this same data is also being supplied to other third parties — including members of @InvestigatorsUK — who pay a fee for access.
> Those users could, in turn, deploy the information in live or prospective legal proceedings, something the agreement expressly prohibits.
This is odd; this is supposed to be public information, isn't it? I suspect it's run into bureaucratic empire-defending rather than a nefarious scheme to conceal cases.
Relatedly, there's an extremely good online archive of important cases in the past, but because they disallow crawlers in robots.txt: https://www.bailii.org/robots.txt not many people know about it. Personally I would prefer if all reporting on legal cases linked to the official transcript, but seemingly none of the parties involved finds it in their interest to make that work.
Not long ago, Italian Supreme Court (Cassazione, ord. 34217/2025) established a critical principle reflecting a broader trend in personal data management: the "digital image" of a person must reflect their actual current situation through complete and accurate information. The court rejected deletion but endorsed contextualization, articles must explicitly note the acquittal (assoluzione) or dismissal that concluded the investigation. An article mentioning "investigation for [crime]" without noting "subsequently acquitted" is factually incomplete, therefore false.
This principle applies directly to search engines and data processors. When Courtsdesk was deleted before reaching AI companies, the government recognized the constraint: AI systems can't apply this "completeness" standard. They preserve raw archives without contextual updates. They can't distinguish between "investigato" (under investigation) and "assolto" (aquitted). They can't enforce the court's requirement that information must be "correttamente aggiornata con la notizia dell'esito favorevole" (properly updated to reflect the favorable resolution of the proceedings).
The UK government prevented the structural violation the Cassazione just identified: permanent archival of incomplete truth. This isn't about suppressing information, it's about refusing to embed factually false contexts into systems designed for eternity.
The minister who set this up claims this is a cover up:
https://x.com/CPhilpOfficial/status/2021295301017923762
https://xcancel.com/CPhilpOfficial/status/202129530101792376...
No right to free speech.
Then they start jailing people for posts.
Then they get rid of juries.
Then they get rid of public records.
What are they trying to hide?
FYI, apparently there was a data breach, but it would seem better to fix the issue and continue with this public service than to just shut it down completely. Here is the Journalist organization in the UK responding:
"The government has cited a significant data protection breach as the reason for its decision - an issue it clearly has a duty to take seriously."
https://www.nuj.org.uk/resource/nuj-responds-to-order-for-th...
Along with the attempt to prevent jury trials for all but the most serious criminal cases, this is beginning to look like an attempt to prevent reporting on an upcoming case. I can think of one happening in April, involving the prime minister. Given he was head of the CPS for 5 years, would know exactly which levers to pull.
Digital access to UK court records was already abysmal. And we're somehow going even further backwards. At least in the US you have initiatives like https://www.courtlistener.com/.
This all loops back to the same thing:
you _really_ shouldn't be allowed to train on information without having a copyright license explicitly allowing it
"publicly available" isn't the same as "anyone can do whatever they want with it", just anyone can read it/use it for research
Courtsdesk are rather misrepresenting this situation.
Quoting from an urgent question in the House of Lords a few days ago:
> HMCTS was working to expand and improve the service by creating a new data licence agreement with Courtsdesk and others to expand access to justice. It was in the course of making that arrangement with Courtsdesk that data protection issues came to light. What has arisen is that this private company has been sharing private, personal and legally sensitive information with a third-party AI company, including potentially the addresses and dates of birth of defendants and victims. That is a direct breach of our agreement with Courtsdesk, which the Conservatives negotiated.
https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2026-02-10/debates/037...
My guess is that the company running this were found to be collaborating with contentious partners, and so the government is shutting down the collaboration as risk-mitigation, in order to internalize decisions within government.
Ministry of Justice in UK has always struck me as very savvy, from my work in the UK civic tech scene. They're quite self-aware, and I assume this is more pro-social than it might seem.
I've looked into the Courtdesk service. It's a stream of events from the courts, as they happen. They claim up to 12,000 updates in a 24 period, aggregated, filtered and organised. While court judgements are public, I don't know if the information Courtdesk provides is. This is a worrying direction.
so the government's fix for a data breach is to delete the entire database instead of fixing the access controls. classic.
So the government was being nice, letting a private company access court data. And the company decided to immediately sell all of that data.
Relevant part:
> HMCTS acted to protect sensitive data after CourtsDesk sent information to a third-party AI company.
(statement from the UK Ministry of Justice on Twitter, CourtsDesk had ran the database)
but it's unclear how much this was an excuse to remove transparency and how much this actually is related to worry how AI could misuse this information
When people who are involved in the upkeep of these systems start saying no is when these decisions will cease. This problems are all done by our acquiesce.
There is no way to verify if European countries have rule of law without insight into their courts.
Naturally the first impulse is to protect criminals while law-abiding citizens are ignored.
Transparency always loses.
Shutting down the only working database is the proof point that perfect is the enemy of good.
Of course, this gives cover to the "well, we're working on something better" and "AI companies are evil"
Fine, shut it down AFTER that better thing is finally in prod (as if).
And if the data was already leaked because you didn't do your due diligence and didn't have a good contract, that's on you. It's out there now anyway.
And, really, what's the issue with AI finally having good citations? Are we really going to try to pretend that AI isn't now permanently embedded in the legal system and that lawyers won't use AI to write extremely formulaic filings?
This is either bureaucracy doing what it does, or an actual conspiracy to shut down external access to public court records. It doesn't actually matter which: what matters is that this needs to be overturned immediately.
2 tiers.
Hard to see how this isn't totally asinine and retarded.
I haven't confirmed it but I've seen journalist friends of mine complain also that the deletion period for much data is about 7 years so victims are genuinely shocked that they can't access their own transcripts even from 2018... Oh and if they can they're often extremely expensive.
The subject of the article is the public right to access the daily schedule of England's courts.
In the United States our Constitution requires the government conduct all trials in public ( with the exception of some Family Court matters ). Secret trials are forbidden. This is a critical element to the operation of any democracy.
Okay, then we need to distribute the database as torrent. Maybe Anna's Archive can help.
Part and parcel!
Yet they are happy to share private health data with Palantir etc. What a shower of hypocrites!
Here's an idea: Host it in the U.S. and tell the UK government to fuck off.
england has fallen and the rest of europe too. they are not free countries anymore
And, to think ... I voted for this horseshit ... I don't remember seeing this in the bloody manifesto.
This is why having decent standards in politics and opposition matters so much.
We all got together to vote out the last wankers, only to find that the current lot are of the same quality but in different ways.
And to think... the 'heads up their arses while trying to suppress a Hitler salute' brigade (Reform) are waiting in the wings to prove my point.
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Something is either public record - in which case it should be on a government website for free, and the AI companies should be free to scrape to their hearts desire...
Or it should be sealed for X years and then public record. Where X might be 1 in cases where you don't want to hurt an ongoing investigation, or 100 if it's someone's private affairs.
Nothing that goes through the courts should be sealed forever.
We should give up with the idea of databases which are 'open' to the public, but you have to pay to access, reproduction isn't allowed, records cost pounds per page, and bulk scraping is denied. That isn't open.