The judg­ment in the case of Mohamed, R (on the applic­a­tion of) v Sec­ret­ary of State for For­eign & Com­mon­wealth Affairs [2009] EWHC 152 (Admin) (04 Feb 2009) isn’t just another reminder of why head­line writers might make court tran­scripts more fun.

[You can read more about the case of Binyam Mohamed here.]

No, it’s a pain­ful reminder of the inad­equacy of global gov­ernance. Wit­ness a shared Anglo-Norman tra­di­tion of law, and a com­mon adher­ence to rep­res­ent­at­ive gov­ern­ment boil down to a couple of Brit­ish judges ask­ing the Obama admin­is­tra­tion to kindly release some information.

There is no supreme court, no appeal. It’s — how might I put it? — a little disappointing.

I strongly advise read­ing the whole judg­ment (linked above), but if you ever wondered what it looked like when a little demo­cracy begged from a big­ger one:

How is this judge­ment of the For­eign Sec­ret­ary in rela­tion to the pub­lic interest in national secur­ity to be bal­anced against the pub­lic interest in open justice as safe­guard­ing the rule of law, free speech and demo­cratic accountability?

In our judge­ment the decis­ive factors are the other means which have res­ul­ted from these pro­ceed­ings for safe­guard­ing demo­cratic account­ab­il­ity and the rule of law (the ref­er­ence of the mat­ter to the ISC and the Attor­ney Gen­eral) and what has already been placed into the pub­lic domain which can engender debate. In the cir­cum­stances now pre­vail­ing, the bal­ance is served by main­tain­ing the redac­tion of the para­graphs from our first judgment.

In short, whatever views may be held as to the con­tinu­ing threat made by the Gov­ern­ment of the United States to pre­vent a short sum­mary of the treat­ment of BM being put into the pub­lic domain by this court, it would not, in all the cir­cum­stances we have set out and in the light of the action taken, be in the pub­lic interest to expose the United King­dom to what the For­eign Sec­ret­ary still con­siders to be the real risk of the loss of intel­li­gence so vital to the safety of our day to day life.

If the inform­a­tion in the redac­ted para­graphs which we con­sider so import­ant to the rule of law, free speech and demo­cratic account­ab­il­ity is to be put into the pub­lic domain, it must now be for the United States Gov­ern­ment to con­sider chan­ging its pos­i­tion or itself put­ting that inform­a­tion into the pub­lic domain.