Planned bill will add offences, penalties for publishing court proceeding recordings
Nicole McKee, courts minister, has announced the government’s plans to replace the Court (Remote Participation) Act 2010 with a law encouraging the use of remote participation, specifically audio and audio-visual links (AVL), as well as impose court rules.
“The new approach will set default appearance types for particular court events in law,” McKee said in a news release. “This means court participants – including defendants, victims, lawyers, Police, Corrections, registry staff and judges – will have more certainty about when remote participation should be used and use across courts should be more consistent.”
In the government’s news release, McKee shared that the bill will add offences and penalties for making and publishing recordings of court proceedings without court authorization.
“Introducing offences will deter this behaviour, which can affect safety and fair trial rights, and enable recordings posted online to be taken down more easily,” McKee said.
In the news release, McKee lamented that courts have not been consistently utilising remote participation or AVL.
“For example, in the last year in District Court criminal events, about two-thirds of potential appearances by a person held in custody were held by AVL, but that varied from 96 per cent in some courts down to 19 per cent in others,” McKee said.
In the news release, McKee stated that the technological update seeks to:
“The new framework will carry over the entitlement, introduced by the Government last year, enabling victims and support people to remotely observe criminal trials and sentencing,” McKee said.
In the news release, McKee stated that the court rules will build upon the judiciary’s significant efforts relating to the recently established remote participation judicial protocols.
McKee added that the court rules will specify when remote participation will be appropriate for use and provide the default settings for which types of events will utilise AVL and which the court will conduct in person.
“However, judicial officers will be able to depart from this if this better serves the interests of justice in individual cases,” McKee said in the government’s news release.
McKee shared that the Ministry of Justice and the judiciary will collaborate to create the detailed court rules. In the news release, the government noted that this work has commenced.
The government noted that it intends to make the information regarding the default settings available for input while the bill is going through the parliamentary process in 2026.
