Open Justice UK: What “Open Court” Means
British justice is supposed to be public. Yet for victims, journalists and ordinary citizens, discovering what was actually said inside a courtroom can mean forms, permissions, large bills and sometimes outright refusal. Open Justice UK turned that contradiction into a campaign — and in little more than a year, its work has travelled from crowdfunding pages to Parliament.
Illustration Disclaimer: The three images accompanying this article are dramatised editorial illustrations created solely to help explain the themes, events and issues discussed in the text. They are not intended to depict any specific person, witness, victim, defendant, official, campaigner or other individual, and any resemblance to real people is entirely coincidental. The scenes, locations, expressions, documents and interactions shown have been artistically reconstructed for explanatory purposes and should not be interpreted as accurate representations of how any particular event occurred. The illustrations are not photographic evidence, factual reconstructions or depictions of actual moments, and should be viewed only as visual interpretations of the subjects covered in the article.There is an old and comforting idea at the heart of the British legal system: justice should not merely be done behind closed doors by officials who assure the public that everything has been handled correctly. Courts should be open, proceedings should be capable of scrutiny and the public should be able to understand how the state exercises one of its most formidable powers.
The Supreme Court has described open justice as enabling people both to understand and scrutinise the justice system. In Cape Intermediate Holdings v Dring, the court stressed that transparency exists not simply to police individual judges but to allow scrutiny of the judicial process itself. That principle sounds straightforward. Open Justice UK discovered how complicated it can become in practice.
A criminal trial may have taken place in a public courtroom. Journalists may have been allowed to sit in the gallery. Yet months or years later, somebody wanting an authoritative record of what actually happened cannot simply visit a government website and download the proceedings.
Crown Court hearings are recorded, but obtaining a transcript normally requires an application. Depending on what is requested, the applicant may have to pay a transcription company, and the court can refuse access to some or all of the material. The Government’s own guidance confirms both the charging system and the possibility of refusal. Into that gap stepped Open Justice UK.
It Started With a Crowdfunder
The project began remarkably recently. On 3 January 2025, Adam Wren launched a fundraiser called Release the Transcripts. Its original purpose was simple: raise enough money to obtain official transcripts relating to major grooming-gang cases and put information that had been technically public — but practically difficult to obtain — within reach of journalists, researchers and ordinary readers.
The fundraiser originally sought £15,000. Its page now records around £57,800 from roughly 1,000 donors, while Wren and Open Justice UK’s Melisa Tourt subsequently described the wider crowdfunding effort as having raised about £100,000. Ten days after the fundraiser began, Open Justice Now Ltd was formally incorporated, on 13 January 2025. Companies House records Adam Wren as a director from incorporation, with Melisa Tourt becoming a director in August that year.
The organisation describes Wren as having previously worked for the National Crime Agency and later in defence research. Tourt brought a background in political communications, civil-liberties campaigning and public affairs. It was an unusual combination for a justice campaign. Rather than beginning with a conventional legal practice or large charity, Open Justice UK approached the problem almost like an investigation: identify the records, map the cases, acquire the source material and make it searchable. And the subject that initially drove that work could hardly have been more politically explosive.
Reopening the Grooming-Gang Record
Britain’s grooming-gang scandal was already well known long before Open Justice UK existed. Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford and other towns had been the subjects of criminal trials, journalism, official reviews and public inquiries. What Open Justice UK argued was missing was something more basic: convenient access to the primary courtroom record.
The organisation began acquiring sentencing remarks and other material from cases around the country. Its current archive includes grooming-gang sentencing documents from Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford, Kirklees and Dewsbury, Sheffield, Liverpool, Shrewsbury and Carlisle. The importance of those documents is easily underestimated.
A newspaper report necessarily condenses a trial. A television package may have two minutes. Political arguments compress years of offending and institutional failure into slogans. A transcript does something different. It records what the prosecution said, what witnesses told the court, what defendants claimed, what lawyers argued and what the judge concluded. It is much harder to dismiss an uncomfortable fact as somebody’s partisan interpretation when the source is the court’s own record. That became Open Justice UK’s most powerful weapon: not another opinion about a controversial case, but the underlying evidence from the case itself.
When an “Open” Trial Becomes Difficult to Open
The campaign also discovered that paying for transcripts was not its only problem. In 2025, Open Justice UK sought the complete transcript of a 2016 Bradford Crown Court prosecution concerning the sexual exploitation of a teenage girl. The request was refused. Contemporary reporting quoted Judge Jonathan Rose as saying that release in the context of the wider public debate would not be appropriate and would be contrary to the public interest. For Open Justice UK, this encapsulated the problem.
The original proceeding had been a public criminal trial. Nobody was proposing that the legal anonymity of victims should simply be abandoned; records could be redacted. Yet obtaining a permanent record of proceedings that members of the public had originally been entitled to watch could still depend on a fresh decision made years later. The controversy attracted political attention because it raised a question much bigger than a single Bradford trial: How open is open justice if access depends upon whether somebody can afford a transcript and whether an individual application is approved?
There are legitimate reasons for restricting court material. Children and sexual-assault victims require protection. Reporting restrictions exist for good reasons. Private information, ongoing proceedings and the rights of defendants cannot simply be swept aside in the name of radical transparency. But that is different from asking why non-sensitive sections of proceedings held openly in court should be difficult or prohibitively expensive to retrieve. That distinction has been central to Open Justice UK’s case.
Fiona Goddard and a British Legal First
Its most significant breakthrough came through survivor Fiona Goddard. Goddard was abused from childhood in Bradford and later waived the anonymity to which she was legally entitled. She became an increasingly prominent campaigner and ultimately joined the organisation’s work as its grooming-gang advisory lead.
Open Justice UK obtained and published the proceedings from the Bradford trial in which she gave evidence. The archive is divided into sections covering social-worker and police evidence, Goddard’s examination, police interviews, evidence from defendants, closing arguments, the judge’s summing-up, verdicts and sentencing.
The organisation describes the release as the first publication of a complete UK trial transcript of its kind, an achievement that has become central to its identity. But the importance of the release was not simply that it accumulated thousands of pages. It restored detail. What had existed in the public imagination as a generic “grooming-gang scandal” became identifiable decisions, warnings, evidence and institutional interactions.
Goddard subsequently told her story in the three-part Grooming Gangs: Fiona’s Story, presented with journalist Julie Bindel and produced with Open Justice UK. The series follows her experiences from her first contact with abusers at 14 through encounters with the institutions that were supposed to protect her.
The project’s producer later reported more than 100,000 listens within its first week and more than 110,000 YouTube views across the episodes, an indication of how far what had begun as a campaign to purchase obscure legal documents had travelled into mainstream public discussion.
From Court Archive to the House of Commons
The political impact was even more striking. During an April 2025 House of Commons debate on child sexual abuse, MP Katie Lam read disturbing material from grooming-gang court records into Hansard while challenging the Government over its approach to inquiries and institutional accountability. The speech discussed cases in Dewsbury, Bradford, Rotherham, Kirklees and Oxford.
Contemporary coverage credited material obtained through Open Justice UK’s transcript work with informing the wider parliamentary campaign. By June 2026, the organisation’s influence was being acknowledged explicitly on the parliamentary record.
During a Commons debate, Robert Jenrick paid tribute to Adam Wren and Open Justice, saying its work uncovering and publishing court transcripts had “propelled this issue back into the national conversation” and arguing that reading the original material had changed public understanding of what the phrase “grooming gangs” represented.
Whatever one’s politics — and grooming-gang policy has become fiercely partisan territory — that is significant. A tiny organisation formed around a crowdfunding campaign had succeeded in getting obscure court records read by the public, journalists and MPs, and those records were influencing arguments inside Parliament itself. That is impact in a very literal sense.
The Henry Nowak Case: Beyond the Original Mission
By 2026, the project was beginning to move beyond grooming-gang trials. One of its most important new releases concerns the murder of 18-year-old university student Henry Nowak in Southampton.
Nowak was stabbed five times by Vickrum Digwa in December 2025. Digwa subsequently falsely claimed that Nowak had racially abused him. When officers initially arrived, Nowak was handcuffed before the seriousness of his injuries became clear. Digwa was later convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 21 years. His mother, Kiran Kaur, was separately jailed for assisting an offender after removing the murder weapon from the scene.
Hampshire Police apologised for Nowak having been arrested and handcuffed while dying. The force referred its response to the Independent Office for Police Conduct. The police have also stressed that a pathologist told the court that Nowak’s fatal injury was not survivable, an important fact amid wider criticism of the officers’ actions. In August 2026, the renamed Centre for Justice Policy released the complete trial transcript of R v Vickrum Digwa and Kiran Kaur.
It calls it only the second complete UK trial transcript made publicly available through this kind of project, following the Bradford release. Again, Open Justice is not acting as a solicitor for the family or attempting to retry the case. Its proposition is simpler. Read what actually happened. Read what witnesses said. Read the competing arguments. Read what the jury was asked to consider. Then decide what the case tells us about policing, criminal justice and institutional decision-making. That method may ultimately prove more important than any single political position adopted by the organisation.
The Real Scandal: Justice That Is Public but Expensive
The most compelling criticism Open Justice UK has made of the justice system does not require anyone to believe in a conspiracy. The Government effectively acknowledges the underlying problem. Official guidance states that applicants for Crown Court transcripts usually have to pay the transcription cost. Victims of certain serious offences can now obtain sentencing remarks free, but this is still a limited category, while longer transcripts may remain chargeable.
And in April 2026 the Ministry of Justice itself announced work on AI-generated court transcripts, explicitly stating that existing fees had forced victims to spend hundreds and sometimes thousands of pounds to discover precisely what had been said in their cases. The Government said the technology could reduce costs and improve transparency, while also announcing broader free access to sentencing remarks for Crown Court victims from spring 2027.
That amounts to a substantial validation of the problem Open Justice UK began campaigning about. The uncomfortable question is not whether British trials are secretly conducted in basements. They are not. The question is whether a system can meaningfully call itself open when somebody who was not physically sitting inside the courtroom may subsequently require specialist knowledge, formal applications and significant amounts of money simply to read what occurred there.
For a wealthy media organisation, those costs may be irritating. For an individual victim, they can be prohibitive. That creates an inequality of access even when the law itself formally treats everybody equally.
A Justice System With an Information Asymmetry
This is where Open Justice UK’s work touches a wider sense of unfairness. The state already possesses the recording. The judge heard the case. The prosecution and defence participated in it. Institutional actors know what happened. Yet the victim, researcher, local journalist or interested citizen may be the person required to navigate a bureaucratic process and fund the creation of a usable record. That creates a striking information imbalance.
It does not automatically mean that judges are hiding misconduct. It does not prove that every controversial decision is wrong. And it certainly does not mean that every document should be dumped online without redaction. But it does mean that the ability to scrutinise justice can depend on resources. There is something difficult to reconcile about that with the principle of open justice.
A courtroom being physically open at 10.30 on a Tuesday morning is of limited value to a country of nearly 70 million people. Modern openness increasingly means durable digital access: judgments, evidence where lawful, sentencing remarks and accurate records that remain available after the courtroom has emptied. The legal system has not entirely caught up with that reality. Open Justice UK found the gap and drove a truck through it.
Transparency Does Not Mean Abandoning Safeguards
There is a necessary caution here. Open justice is not synonymous with publishing everything. Court reporting restrictions protect children, victims of sexual offences and other vulnerable people. Private material can cause enormous harm if released carelessly. Documents may contain addresses, medical histories and information about people who have never been accused of wrongdoing.
Open Justice UK’s own archive states that documents are acquired lawfully and redacted before publication. That matters because the strongest argument for reform is not that courts should become an unrestricted data dump. It is that technology and sensible redaction should make lawful public information genuinely public, rather than preserving a system in which theoretical openness frequently ends at the courtroom door.
Transparency must protect victims as well as expose institutions. Those principles are not opposites. A competent system should be capable of doing both.
Open Justice UK Becomes the Centre for Justice Policy
The organisation itself is now changing. OpenJusticeUK.org currently announces that Open Justice UK has become the Centre for Justice Policy. The transcript archive remains active under the Open Justice project, but the organisation is expanding into broader research about the performance of Britain’s justice system.
Its current work includes studying patterns across grooming-gang cases, investigating sentencing and justice policy, comparing Britain with other legal systems, and interviewing people working on the front line of care, social services and safeguarding. That evolution makes sense. The transcript campaign uncovered something larger than inaccessible documents. It exposed how difficult evidence can be to obtain before anyone can even begin arguing about policy.
The Centre for Justice Policy’s new premise is effectively that reform should begin with evidence rather than political abstraction: obtain the record, identify patterns, understand what failed and only then decide how legislation or policy should change.
Whether the organisation ultimately succeeds at that broader mission remains to be seen. It is still young, relatively small and operating in areas where almost every conclusion can become politically contentious. But its first experiment has already demonstrated something important.
Why It Resonated
Open Justice UK did not create British distrust of institutions. It arrived at a moment when that distrust was already substantial. The Post Office Horizon scandal had demonstrated that respected institutions could maintain disastrous positions for years. Grooming-gang inquiries had documented repeated failures by police, councils and safeguarding bodies. People had become increasingly reluctant to accept trust us as an adequate answer.
Open Justice UK offered something perfectly suited to that climate. Not another assurance. A document. Instead of telling the public what a judge said, it tried to let them read the judge’s words. Instead of summarising what happened during a trial, it attempted to publish the trial. Instead of asking people to trust an interpretation, it supplied the source material from which competing interpretations could be tested.
That is why its influence became larger than its size. And it explains why some of the organisation’s most powerful material is not commentary at all. It is evidence.
The Courtroom Door Is Only the Beginning
There is a temptation to measure Open Justice UK’s success entirely through the grooming-gang debate, Fiona Goddard’s story, parliamentary interventions or the Henry Nowak transcript. Its more enduring contribution may be broader. It has exposed the strange difference between justice conducted in public and justice accessible to the public. Those are not the same thing.
Britain has spent centuries developing the principle that courts should operate under public scrutiny. Yet the digital infrastructure surrounding those courts can still behave as though the only meaningful observer is somebody prepared to travel to a courthouse, sit in the gallery for several weeks and take notes by hand. That model belongs to another age.
A justice system does not become fair merely by publishing transcripts, and transparency cannot repair every institutional failure. But secrecy, expense and unnecessary bureaucracy make failures more difficult to discover and institutions more difficult to hold accountable.
Open Justice UK’s achievement has been to make that contradiction impossible to ignore. It began by asking the public to pay for some transcripts. It ended up asking Britain a much larger question: If justice belongs to the public, why does the public have to fight so hard to see it?
References and Sources
- UK Supreme Court — Cape Intermediate Holdings Ltd v Dring [2019] UKSC 38
Supreme Court judgment discussing the constitutional principle of open justice and the public’s ability to scrutinise court proceedings.
Supreme Court judgment PDF - GOV.UK — Guidance for Requesting a Transcript of Court or Tribunal Proceedings
Official guidance explaining how court transcripts can be requested, the potential costs involved and circumstances in which access may be refused.
Court transcript guidance - GoFundMe — Release the Transcripts
Adam Wren’s original crowdfunding campaign to fund access to court transcripts relating to grooming-gang prosecutions.
Release the Transcripts fundraiser - Companies House — Open Justice Now Ltd
Official company records documenting the incorporation and directors of the organisation behind Open Justice UK.
Open Justice Now Ltd filing history - Centre for Justice Policy — About Us
Background information on Adam Wren, Melisa Tourt, the organisation’s history and its evolution from Open Justice UK into the Centre for Justice Policy.
Centre for Justice Policy – About Us - Open Justice UK Transcript Archive — Sentencing Remarks
Collection of sentencing material from grooming-gang cases including Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford, Kirklees, Dewsbury, Sheffield, Liverpool, Shrewsbury and Carlisle.
Sentencing remarks archive - GB News — Bradford Grooming-Gang Trial Transcript Dispute
Reporting on the refusal of Open Justice UK’s request for the complete transcript of a Bradford Crown Court prosecution and the resulting political controversy.
GB News report - Open Justice UK Transcript Archive — Bradford Full Trial Transcripts
The published Bradford proceedings involving survivor Fiona Goddard, including witness evidence, police evidence, defendants’ testimony, closing arguments, summing-up, verdicts and sentencing.
Bradford trial transcripts - Centre for Justice Policy — Main Website
Source for information about Open Justice UK’s transcript-publication project and its claim regarding the publication of complete UK trial transcripts.
Centre for Justice Policy - Apple Podcasts — Grooming Gangs: Fiona’s Story
Three-part series featuring Fiona Goddard and journalist Julie Bindel, examining Goddard’s experience of abuse and institutional failures.
Grooming Gangs: Fiona’s Story - LinkedIn — Tom Davenport
Producer commentary regarding the initial audience figures achieved by Grooming Gangs: Fiona’s Story.
Tom Davenport’s post - UK Parliament / Hansard — House of Commons, 8 April 2025
Parliamentary record containing Katie Lam’s contribution concerning child sexual exploitation and material from grooming-gang court cases.
Hansard – 8 April 2025 - The Critic — Grooming-Gang National Inquiry Commentary
Commentary discussing the campaign for a national grooming-gang inquiry and the role of court transcripts in informing political debate.
The Critic article - UK Parliament / Hansard — House of Commons, 1 June 2026
Parliamentary record in which Robert Jenrick credited Adam Wren and Open Justice for publishing court transcripts and bringing the issue back into national discussion.
Hansard – 1 June 2026 - ITV News Meridian — Henry Nowak / Vickrum Digwa Case
Reporting on the murder of Henry Nowak and the subsequent conviction and sentencing of Vickrum Digwa’s mother, Kiran Kaur, for assisting an offender.
ITV News report - Hampshire & Isle of Wight Constabulary — Vickrum Digwa Murder Conviction
Official police statement covering the murder conviction and circumstances surrounding the death of Henry Nowak.
Hampshire Police statement - GOV.UK — Form EX107: Order a Transcript of Court or Tribunal Proceedings
Official government page covering the transcript-request process and provisions relating to access and payment.
EX107 transcript request page - Ministry of Justice / GOV.UK — AI Court Transcripts to Boost Access to Justice for Victims
Government announcement concerning plans to use AI-generated transcripts, reduce costs and extend free access to sentencing remarks for victims.
Ministry of Justice announcement - Open Justice UK — Transcript Archive
Main archive for court transcripts and other legal records acquired and published by the project.
Open Justice UK Transcript Archive - Open Justice UK — Official Website
Official site announcing the transition of Open Justice UK into the Centre for Justice Policy.
Open Justice UK