This is a guest post by David Holland
At 10 am On Friday 17 April, in Northampton, I have the dubious pleasure of squaring up for the second time against the Met Office over Zero Order Drafts of an IPCC Assessment Report. I am no Perry Mason and the hearing was not my idea, so I am not recommending that anyone turn up for a stellar performance from me. But if anyone in the area is contemplating an appeal of an FOI decision, it is an opportunity to see an oral hearing.
As you may know at the first oral contest with the Met Office, over the seven AR5 ZODs that had not been leaked, I lost. However, in its decision the Tribunal made it clear that, had AR5 been published at the time of my request, it may well have decided differently. So, at the suggestion of a BH reader, I asked for the 10-year-old ZODs of AR4. After all, the first serious FOI request that I made was for John Mitchell's AR4 emails. However, as I described in February, the AR4 emails were refused, relying on a document entitled...
Working Group I Position on Confidentiality of Draft Reports, Other Documents and Communications
As I mentioned in February, the Met Office took great exception to my response to the witness statement of Peter Stott and insisted on an oral hearing. I think it might be thought discourteous of me to say too much about what I plan to say, but I think I can mention a couple of things that are published by the Met Office at WhatDoTheyKnow.com, in response to a separate FOI request for relevant documents that ought to have been disclosed.
The first of the 37 pages disclosed is very interesting. A week after Candidate Stocker got his confidentiality decision at the May 2011 33rd IPCC Session he (I assume) sent this redacted email to (or a copy found its way to) the Met Office. He wrote:
The IPCC Panel decisions that I referred to in our recent phone conversations have now been placed on the IPCC web site. At its plenary session in Abu Dhabi last week, the IPCC adopted a decision that puts into words its standard practice concerning the confidentiality of draft reports. There was a proposal to go further and also explicitly refer to emails and other documentation produced during the drafting, which had quite a lot of support, but those words were not included in the final decision which reads as follows:
He then copied the decision exactly as it appears on page 16 of the report of the 33rd IPCC Session. However, I wondered just how he might have known that there was quite a lot of support among delegates for a much extended decision. I found the answer on page 54 of the IPCC session report where his name appeared with an "H" alongside it. This addition is explained on page 46, where candidate Stocker was revealed as the Head of the two-man Swiss delegation, (presumably) authorised to speak and vote for Switzerland. We may well see more of him!
Another document was identified by the release. It is on the WGII website and gives its take on the IPCC confidentiality decision. It includes position - helpful and somewhat contradictory to WGI - on confidentiality of drafts:
The IPCC does not publicly release drafts prior to the completion of a report because the contents of the early drafts may not meet the IPCC's high standards of excellence, balance, and clarity. Therefore, reviewers and authors are asked not to cite, post, or share drafts. These early drafts are not confidential in the sense that they are hidden, protected, or secret.
I should mention that while the Tribunal should be open to the public, the location is normally used for mundane Tribunals and I have no idea how much space is reserved for the public. St. Katharine's Street is a short walk from the railway and bus stations. I must also say that I am unlikely to be able to respond at any length until after the hearing, as I still have a lot to prepare.
To close on another matter, my communications with the Met Office, which had improved greatly with its latest change in lawyer, came to a halt at about 10am on 1 April. On mentioning it, a week later the Tribunal Clerk, it transpired that the entire Government Legal Department at One Kemble Street was taken out by the Kingsway fire, which may well have started in the ducts under it. It is still closed and I was asked to forward emails that the Government Secure intranet (GSi) seemed to have lost track of.