On Monday the Justice and Security bill came back to a packed Commons at Report stage. The bill extends the secret hearings, known as closed material procedures (CMPs), into the main civil courts in England and Wales. Read the full story

Government proposals to expand secret courts suffered a series of hefty defeats in the House of Lords last Wednesday, significantly narrowing the scope of the justice and security bill. This can have come as no surprise to the government. The opposition of human rights groups and many prominent lawyers, and parliament’s joint committee on human rights (JCHR), to secret trials and withholding evidence has been mounting. Read the full story

My dictionary has several definitions of ‘trolling’, but the one currently in the news is “to send an email with a contentious or offensive message intended to provoke outrage…in the hope of starting a heated debate.”

The new Defamation bill that had its second reading in the Commons on Tuesday takes aim at trolls. In a major reform of the libel laws, it will see a duty placed on internet service providers to try to identify internet trolls without victims needing to resort to costly legal action. Websites will also be given greater protection from being sued if they help to identify those posting defamatory messages. Read the full story

Last Monday Justice Secretary Ken Clarke went to the Commons to announce a consultation exercise on plans to improve the way the criminal justice system deals with victims of crime. He said: “Proper protection and support for those who have suffered at the hands of criminals is a fundamental part of a civilised justice system, yet ours is falling short in some respects.”

The planned shake-up will see the ending of payments for minor injuries. Some estimates are that more than 17,000 violent crime victims each year will be excluded entirely from the criminal injuries compensation scheme under the proposals, and many crime victims who suffer more serious injuries will face Read the full story

Last Wednesday Secretary of State for Justice, Ken Clarke, made a written statement to the Commons on Competitive Tendering. The proposed timetable has yet again slipped back.

He told the Commons: “The Government believe that tendering criminal defence work for competition, alongside regulatory changes, has the potential to significantly modernise legal aid provision, improve the service provided to legal aid clients, streamline the procurement process and deliver value for money for the taxpayer.” In a thinly veiled threat he said: Read the full story

Last Tuesday Ken Clarke reignited the debate on the causes of the urban riots. Writing in the ‘Guardian’ he said that the riots were an outburst of outrageous behaviour by the criminal classes.

In an echo of John Reid’s classification of the home office as “unfit for purpose” he blamed the riots on a “broken penal system” that has failed to rehabilitate a group of hardcore offenders he describes as the “criminal classes”. He said: “It’s not yet been widely recognised, but Read the full story

You’ve probably seen the press adverts already. They ask if you will be silenced by cuts to Legal aid. “The Government is planning cuts that will deny millions of people access to justice. Don’t let this happen. Sound Off for Justice.” Read the full story

On Monday Ken Clarke took his knife to legal aid. The scale of the reductions revealed in the Green Paper  – £350m a year to be taken out of a £914m annual civil and family legal aid budget by 2014 – had been widely anticipated. The total bill of civil and criminal legal aid currently runs to £2.1bn a year, and a substantial contribution towards the reduction of 23% over four years in the Department’s budget was inevitable. Read the full story