The Parole Board’s decision to hold Jon Venables’s latest parole hearing in private is, at its core, a judgement about institutional process prevailing over public sentiment — and, on the evidence available, it is a defensible one.
Venables, now 44, was convicted alongside Robert Thompson in 1993 for the abduction, torture, and murder of two-year-old James Bulger. The pair were ten years old at the time of the offence. Venables was released on licence in July 2001, recalled to prison in February 2010 after indecent images of children were discovered on his computer, released again in August 2013, and recalled once more in November 2017 for the same category of offence. His most recent parole bid, heard in September 2020, was rejected in 2023 on the grounds that he continued to pose a danger to children. His current application represents his latest attempt to secure release.
Denise Fergus, James’s mother, had applied for the hearing to be conducted in public, arguing that transparency would help counter what she described as “misinformation” about the case — misinformation she said had a “retraumatising impact” on her — and would improve public understanding of the parole process more broadly. A number of media organisations submitted parallel applications. Her request to observe the hearing as a participant has, separately, been granted.
A High Bar, Deliberately Set
Parole Board hearings are held in private as a matter of standing practice, though they may be opened to the public where doing so is deemed to be “in the interests of justice.” Sir John Saunders, deputy chairman of the Security Vetting Appeals Panel, ruled on behalf of the Board that this threshold had not been met. His reasoning was direct: a public hearing would make it “very difficult for Jon Venables to give evidence” because he risked being observed by individuals “seeking to get information so that they can kill him.” The safety concern is not a rhetorical flourish. Venables has lived under a new identity since his original release, a protection the courts have repeatedly upheld precisely because the threat to his life has been assessed as credible and serious.
The instinct to demand openness is understandable, and in most contexts it is to be encouraged. Transparency in the administration of justice serves important democratic functions, and Mrs Fergus’s frustration is both human and legitimate. Yet the parole system is not a public tribunal designed to satisfy the broader appetite for accountability in a particular case. It is a structured risk-assessment process, and its integrity depends on the ability of all parties — including the subject of the hearing — to give candid evidence. A proceeding in which Venables could not speak freely, for fear that his words or his demeanour might furnish hostile actors with identifying details, would not be a more just hearing. It would be a compromised one.
What this episode ultimately illustrates is the tension inherent in any system that must balance procedural fairness with public interest, and do so under the additional pressure of a case that retains an extraordinary emotional charge more than three decades on. The Parole Board’s role is to assess risk dispassionately, not to provide a stage for collective reckoning. Sir John Saunders’s conclusion — that the bar for a public hearing is a high one, and that it was not cleared here — reflects a sober reading of the rules as they stand. Whether those rules themselves require revision is a legitimate question for Parliament. For now, the institution has done what institutions are supposed to do: applied the framework it was given, and explained its reasoning.