Secret Evidence and the Rights to Fair Trial and Due Process – How Far Is Too Far? Analyzing Competing Interests in the Wake of the War Against Terror and Immigration
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With the onset of terrorism across the world, secrecy is a pressing challenge that seeks to protect the sensitive information and capabilities of a state. This comes at the price of expediency over the administration of justice. The delicate balance between state security and human rights has been debated over for decades. Contextually, this thesis attempts to interact with this great debate from the lens of international law to analyze the controversial issues it raises. It seeks to identify the central question, where exactly the line is to be drawn between the state’s ability to retain information that it deems as critical to national security and upholding fundamental guarantees of individuals to due process and fair trial. The findings of this thesis clarify that justice requires the use of secret evidence to be ended because a balancing exercise would always result in favour of the state. Abundance of literature documents the perils of executive bodies bulldozing judicial processes in the overriding interests of ‘national security’, particularly with respect to terrorism and immigration proceedings. Some states have introduced a system of a special advocates that comes with its own problems. The thesis attempts to incorporate an analysis of the theoretical underpinnings that argue both in favour of and against the use of secret evidence in trials. There is no denying the importance of either, for at one end the rights of an individual are at stake and at the other, the integrity of the state and protection of its people. While most of the debate surrounding secret evidence centers on a balancing exercise of the competing interests, this thesis lays the landscape for doing away with the use of secret evidence. Moreover, in analyzing the rulings of ECtHR in addition to the a comparative analysis of the approaches adopted in the United Kingdom, Canada and the USA, this thesis endeavors to identify best practices and see how international law standards are being applied in the domestic practice of these prominent players in the international community.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.171 | 0.277 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.090 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.028 | 0.046 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.018 | 0.018 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".