Yes, it sounds like this was inappropriate but possibly not illegal. Normally the strongest sanction the judge could take here would be to find them in contempt of court, but he let them off with a warning/admonishment which also seems fine.
> IPT secretary Susan Cobb wrote back to say: "It was inappropriate for your staff to seek to intervene in ongoing legal proceedings..."
> Lord Justice Singh told the room: "The tribunal's secretary acted entirely appropriately in responding the way she did and by drawing these matters to my attention. In March 2019, it was recognised that the direct communication was inappropriate."
My understanding is that expate communication with the judge or a judges staff in a court case is not legal (unless allowed under very specific situations).
I never said it was a good thing — of course evidence tampering is utterly unacceptable. The systems here simply hew closely to expected standards of behaviour from institutions, and in any event there are a range of mechanisms to address the behaviour without needing to criminalise it.
The scary consequences of overbearing "Classified" status assigned to information that human beings are embarrassed by is likely the single biggest omission to the public record thus denying the public the ability to form political opinions fairly.
It's crafty mixing of real classified information with embarrassing information...
"The address of our safehouse is classified, but all the letters we send eachother have the address on the top, therefore all these letters are classified."
Parody court agrees with parody inspector on parody rules.
Very real threat temporarily averted. Next time it will be conducted more subtly but no less mistakably, so the parody court won't hear about it or what it was meant to cover up, and all will be well.
According to Wikipedia, the IPT upheld ten of 1468 complaints from 2000 to 2012. High standards of conduct, judicial probity and intellectual excellence do not inevitably lead to justice—we know this from, e.g., Singapore—and, whilst we cannot determine much sans access to classified data and rulings, this seems to be one of those cases. The problem with the IPT is probably not this sort of exploit, but rather its overall structure and the statutory framework within which it operates.
How has putin not been mentioned here? The judge must be a Putin asset to deny the spies requests! They're against Putin (Philby, Burgess, etc etc aside) so if the judge is against them he's Putin.
Oh you want evidence? That's not how Putin asset accusations work. Boris Johnson is currently being attacked for being Putin's. As is brexit. No evidence. Evidence of Russian meddling had largely evaporated, but hey. Putin is an awful human and Russia would be better off with someone kinder so WMD it all the way!
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 99.1 ms ] threadIt’s not great that they asked, but the system does appear to have worked as it should.
Or am I missing something?
Reality sounds more like they made a procedural request (possibly not a correct one) which was denied and they apologised.
> IPT secretary Susan Cobb wrote back to say: "It was inappropriate for your staff to seek to intervene in ongoing legal proceedings..."
> Lord Justice Singh told the room: "The tribunal's secretary acted entirely appropriately in responding the way she did and by drawing these matters to my attention. In March 2019, it was recognised that the direct communication was inappropriate."
"The address of our safehouse is classified, but all the letters we send eachother have the address on the top, therefore all these letters are classified."
Very real threat temporarily averted. Next time it will be conducted more subtly but no less mistakably, so the parody court won't hear about it or what it was meant to cover up, and all will be well.
Oh you want evidence? That's not how Putin asset accusations work. Boris Johnson is currently being attacked for being Putin's. As is brexit. No evidence. Evidence of Russian meddling had largely evaporated, but hey. Putin is an awful human and Russia would be better off with someone kinder so WMD it all the way!