Aussie child sex abuse scandal raises questions on gag orders

SYDNEY: Cardinal George Pell’s trial and conviction of child sex abuse in Australia was one of the biggest scandals to hit the Catholic Church, but the public was not allowed to know about it for months.

A blanket gag order stopped reporters from even mentioning the trial’s existence in what experts called an example of the tussle between open justice and the right to a fair trial in the digital age.

The court order, first imposed in the middle of last year after the Vatican finance chief was called to face two trials in Melbourne, was meant to guard against jury bias in the second case as the first was heard.

But with a single judge in effect seeking to prevent worldwide reporting of court proceedings, some observers said it represented excessive use of suppression orders.

It raised questions about whether the borderless online world rendered such measures outdated in restricting the spread of information.

“There’s this kind of mentality that ‘if in doubt, we suppress’,” said Jason Bosland, a media law expert from the University of Melbourne, of the use of suppression orders in Australia.

“They are applied far too readily, they’re granted far too readily. But it’s not only the number, it’s also the scope of orders. They are very broad.”

In Australia, open justice is a crucial aspect of the court system, with suppression orders originally meant to be used only in exceptional cases, such as those involving sexual assault or national security.

A gangland war in Melbourne in the late 1990s changed that.

In a complex web of high-profile trials, courts turned to gag orders to protect witnesses and defendants and became accustomed to using them in other cases.

“It caused a real cultural shift... if you were representing someone who had been charged with a serious offence, one of the things that would run through your mind is, ‘Oh, I’ll apply for a suppression order’,” Bosland said.

Growth in Internet use meant the judiciary was struggling to control the flow of information from cases, making it harder for defendants to get a fair trial.

Fearful that jurors, who are not sequestered, could be unfairly influenced, judges, prosecutors and defence lawyers used suppression orders to shut down public reporting.

A 2017 review of Victoria’s suppression orders found that while the number issued was small compared with the caseload, of the 1,594 orders made between 2014 and 2016, more than one-fifth were blanket bans and 12 per cent did not even specify on what grounds they were made.