More promising was the inquiry by parliament's joint committee on human rights, which summoned a range of witnesses to give evidence, including me. I don't wish to be unkind about its members but it is probably fair to say that not all of them could be characterised as the most high-powered or hard-hitting members of the Lords or Commons. Fortunately, they are blessed with an extremely effective legal adviser, Murray Hunt, who suggests questions for them to ask and will have a hand in drafting what I am sure will be a highly critical report.

But nothing seemed to dent the government's confidence, not even an attack on its proposals — which I reported elsewhere, with equally little effect — by the very lawyers on whom ministers rely to support the existing system of closed courts. They are called special advocates. Their job is to represent the interests of an individual in proceedings from which that person has been excluded on grounds of national security. The special advocate is not allowed to tell the individual what "closed material" has been adduced in evidence against him by the government. It follows that the advocate is not able to take meaningful instructions from the person at risk, such as "I was somewhere else at that time." It's a very unsatisfactory compromise. The special advocates most involved say that these procedures "remain fundamentally unfair". 

But it's these procedures that the green paper seeks to extend to all civil claims, not just those involving national security. Closed material procedures would be available whenever a minister had certified that "certain relevant sensitive material would cause damage to the public interest". That term was left deliberately vague in the green paper but appears to extend to commercially sensitive information in which the government has no direct interest.

Extending closed material procedures in the way the government proposed was "insupportable", the special advocates said in their response to the green paper. It was one thing to argue that the inherent unfairness should be tolerated in deportation cases, they argued. It was quite another for ministers to extend that lack of transparency to any civil proceedings, including those in which the government itself was a defendant.