Open Justice UK launched in January 2025 after crowdfunding £100,000 to access court transcripts of grooming gang cases. Crucial information about Asian grooming gang exploitation remains inaccessible to victims, researchers and the public due to high costs and bureaucratic barriers. Open Justice UK aims to secure official transcripts from landmark cases, revealing systemic failures and driving meaningful reform to better protect vulnerable victims. Open Justice UK is co-founded and run by Adam Wren, a campaigner and security researcher, and Melisa Tourt, a policy communications specialist. The campaign can be found on @OPENJ_UK on X. What follows is a recent Substack post from Melisa and Adam on the resistance the campaign has often faced from judges in seeking permission to obtain said transcripts.
We’ve submitted 33 requests for transcripts related to grooming gang trials: 14 have been approved and five have been rejected. While this initially sounds like a reasonable success rate, these early refusals reveal troubling patterns that threaten transparency in our justice system. To date, 100% of requests for full transcripts have been blocked, and certain courts have systematically denied every request submitted.
Take two sentencing remarks transcript requests, both for very similar cases. One goes to Sheffield Crown Court in relation to the 2017 sentencing of six men in a Rotherham grooming gang, and the other goes to the Central Criminal Court requesting the sentencing remarks from the 2015 Aylesbury grooming gang. Within a month, both courts had come back. Sheffield Crown Court granted the release of the sentencing remarks with no questions asked – work to produce the transcript is already underway, the Central Criminal Court comes back with:
Why is it the case that Sheffield, and indeed the multiple other courts we’ve had releases from, were perfectly able to release transcripts related to child sexual exploitation but this is something the Central Criminal Court is “prohibited” from sharing under reporting restrictions and criminal procedure rules?
The judge here is absolutely right to consider Criminal Procedure Rule 5.5, which governs access to transcripts of Crown Court proceedings. While this rule does restrict transcript access where reporting limitations apply, it specifically allows for provision to “a recipient to whom that supply will not contravene those reporting restrictions” under CPR 5.5(2)(b)(ii). What’s troubling is the inconsistency in application – we’ve successfully obtained transcripts in near-identical cases from other courts. The judge’s blanket denial suggests a presumption that we would violate reporting restrictions despite substantial assurances to the contrary in the application, raising questions about arbitrary application of discretionary powers.
Judges leveraging their lack of trust in campaigners and the media to block legitimate access to court information is an increasingly troubling pattern. The recent Court of Appeal ruling in the Sara Sharif case highlights this problem perfectly. A judge had anonymised three family court judges who had overseen proceedings related to the murdered 10 year-old, claiming there was a “real risk” of harm from a “virtual lynch mob” and explicitly stating he “did not believe the media could be trusted to report matters in a fair, accurate and responsible way”. The Court of Appeal overturned this decision, with Sir Geoffrey Vos declaring the judge had “got carried away” and made “inappropriate and unfair remarks about the press”. This judicial distrust extends beyond just naming judges to denying access to court transcripts, as in our case under CPR 5.5, even when applicants commit to honouring reporting restrictions. When courts make decisions based on speculation about how information might be used, rather than on evidence or the provisions of the law itself, they undermine both transparency and the consistent application of justice.
Most troublingly, this creates a postcode lottery for access to transparent justice. Whether crucial information can be obtained shouldn’t hinge on arbitrary geographical boundaries or which judge happens to be presiding. While child sexual exploitation cases occur nationwide, a significant proportion are concentrated in just a handful of Crown Courts: the Central Criminal Court (Old Bailey), Sheffield, Manchester Minshull Street, Newcastle and Leeds. It takes just one of these courts blocking access to records for a substantial amount of information to become entirely inaccessible, with highly concentrated effects. For example, if Manchester Minshull Street had a particularly uncooperative judge, virtually none of the information around the Rotherham cases could be accessed, effectively creating information blackouts in some of the most significant exploitation cases in recent history.
Judges clearly aren’t singing from the same hymn sheet; in fact it’s not even clear whether they’ve seen the same book, with some readily providing transcripts while others categorically refuse. Navigating the system becomes a game of judicial roulette. Most concerning is the readiness of some judges to presume bad intentions despite explicit commitments to honour reporting restrictions, thereby creating arbitrary barriers where the law provides clear pathways for responsible access. This inconsistency doesn’t just frustrate our work around grooming gangs; it undermines public confidence in a system that should be applying the same standards of openness and transparency regardless of which courthouse door you knock on.
This institutional presumption of bad faith is disturbingly reminiscent of the same pattern that enabled these grooming gangs to operate for years, from councils that refused to investigate patterns for fear the public couldn’t handle ethnic dimensions responsibly, to police and social services dismissing vulnerable victims as unreliable troublemakers, the common thread has always been authorities that are allowed to mark their own homework, trusting their biased judgements over transparency and accountability.
Stop Press: You can watch a recent interview with Adam Wren about Open Justice UK for GB News here.
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