Justice Sector and the Rule of Law - AfriMAP

for other sufficient reason’ to bar a particular individual or individuals or hold the trial or part ofit behind closed doors. Members of the public are entitled to attend all judicial proceedings byvirtue of section 60 of the Courts Act 240 which provides that the proceedings of every court mustbe ‘carried on in open court to which the public may generally have access’.The right of the public to attend criminal trials does not extend to proceedings involvingjuvenile courts, hearings of cases involving people aged below 18 years or certain preliminaryproceedings. 241 The law also empowers judicial officers to bar members of the public from anyhearing if such exclusion is ‘expedient in the interests of justice and propriety or for other sufficientreason’. 242 The scope of this power, which is not restricted, for example, to the protectionof children or witnesses, is so wide as to be inconsistent with international standards relatingto the public’s access to trials. 243 There are no legal restrictions that are specifically targeted atjournalists to limit their access of to information about the justice system or their reporting on it.Nevertheless, there are some laws of general application that could be used for this purpose onthe pretext of national security, public order or morality. 244Prior to the establishment of the Crime and Justice Statistics Division of the NationalStatistical Office in 2002, the government did not have a mechanism for collating statisticsfrom across various institutions in the justice sector. This might explain why the governmentdid not make available statistics on the sector as a whole. Some individual institutions couldmake available statistics related to their operations. For example, information on the number ofcases before the courts, the judgments rendered, and the appeals filed is always readily availablefrom the registries of the High Court and Supreme Court of Appeal in Blantyre, Lilongwe andMzuzu; statistics on the prison population and its distribution are readily available at the PrisonDepartment headquarters in Zomba; and statistics on the police investigations and prosecutionsare readily available at the headquarters of the police service in Lilongwe. The fact that statisticsare collected by the various institutions and not consolidated means that there is no standardisationof their quality and their correlations cannot be established. The establishment of the Crimeand Justice Statistics Division of the National Statistical Office is a welcome first step in addressingthis problem as is the plan of the National Statistical Office to collect and publish statisticson crime, justice and governance on a regular basis. 245 It is recommended that this plan beimplemented urgently; that it cover justice in its broadest sense and not focus only on criminal