Recommendation 24

The process for a judicial warrant contains some guarantees. However, we have some concerns given the potential for a person’s access to their lawyer to be delayed, the potential for a detainee to be excluded from part of the hearing, and the potential for information relied upon to be withheld from the detainee and their legal representative. As a result, it is possible that a detained person may not be told sufficient information to enable them to be in a position to counter any claims made against them in a part of the hearing from which they are excluded. There are therefore risks that this process does not contain sufficient protections against arbitrary detention. A requirement that a person should be able to know the case against them might improve the protections in paragraph 40 of Schedule 3.