When a Hearing Becomes a Spectacle
By Ayman Fouad Abdelgawad
Public scrutiny protects justice, but an audience can develop appetites that scrutiny does not require.
There are two ways to watch a hearing. One asks whether power is being exercised fairly. The other waits for somebody to falter. Both can occupy the same public gallery, read the same report and defend their interest as transparency. Their resemblance makes it difficult to say where necessary scrutiny ends and consumption begins.
Article 6(1) of the European Convention on Human Rights provides for public hearings in the matters it covers, while recognising specified grounds for excluding the press and public. The text itself therefore resists a crude choice between total secrecy and unrestricted exposure. Publicity serves justice; its relationship with justice requires judgement.
The case for openness is powerful. An unseen authority can grow comfortable with its own account of events. Public access allows reporting, criticism and scrutiny of whether procedures match their promises. It also prevents the people responsible for decisions from controlling every description of what occurred. A hearing belongs to a system that owes explanations beyond the room.
But visibility changes behaviour as well as revealing it. A frightened witness may seem evasive. An articulate participant may appear reliable before their account has been tested. An awkward pause, isolated from hours of careful evidence, can become the event through which an entire dispute is remembered. The public receives more material while understanding less of its relative importance.
This difficulty cannot be solved by treating embarrassment as a sufficient reason for secrecy. Powerful people would find that rule useful immediately. The relevant distinction concerns purpose and proportion: what must be accessible to evaluate the decision, and what merely satisfies curiosity about the people caught inside it? Those interests sometimes overlap, but they are not identical.
Editors and readers consequently have responsibilities that formal access rules cannot discharge for them. A report can explain an evidential dispute without turning distress into a character verdict. A reader can wait for the finding rather than treating an allegation as a preview of inevitable guilt. Context is slower to distribute than a striking fragment, but speed is not the measure of a fair account.
I want courts and other decision-making bodies to be open enough that authority cannot hide behind ceremony. I also want our attention to have an object more serious than humiliation. The proper beneficiary of a public hearing is the public's capacity to judge its institutions. When the audience becomes chiefly interested in the vulnerable face at the centre, transparency may still be present, but its moral purpose has begun to leave the room.