Who gets the transcript?

In 2024, the Scottish Government introduced a scheme allowing complainers in High Court sexual offence cases to obtain trial transcripts at public expense. The policy was confirmed in the government announcement Free court transcripts for rape victims and updated in the letter Free transcripts for complainers in High Court sexual offence cases: letter to Criminal Justice Committee. That update, published on 5 February 2025, records that the pilot launched on 1 March 2024 and was written under the name of Angela Constance. The scheme has since been extended through 2026.

The scheme applies to complainers. It does not extend to the accused. There is no equivalent entitlement, and no parallel scheme providing transcripts to those convicted, including those maintaining innocence.

Two people involved in the same trial do not have the same access to the record of what took place.

A transcript is not a peripheral document. It is the closest thing the system has to a complete account of proceedings. It records the evidence as it was given, the questions as they were asked, and the directions the jury received before reaching a verdict. When a conviction is challenged, that is where the work starts.

For someone who says they have been wrongly convicted, access to that record is not optional in any practical sense. It is how you check what was actually said rather than what is later claimed. It is how you examine whether inconsistencies were addressed or missed. It is how the conduct of the trial can be tested against the outcome. Without it, the process is reduced to reconstruction, relying on notes, recollection, and second-hand accounts.

The present position creates a straightforward imbalance. The party whose account has been accepted at trial may be provided with the transcript at public expense. The party seeking to challenge that outcome must obtain it privately. Transcript costs can reach several thousand pounds in longer or more complex cases.

This sits alongside findings previously established by this publication through Freedom of Information work. Those findings showed that the Crown Office cannot identify cases involving the Moorov doctrine without manually reviewing files, and that the courts record Section 275 applications in a way that does not allow meaningful analysis of how often defence evidence is restricted. There is no system-level dataset showing how key procedures in sexual offence trials operate across cases.

Taken together, that leaves a system where some of the most consequential aspects of a case are not easily examined in aggregate. The transcript is one of the few places where the detail exists in a stable and reviewable form. Access to it therefore carries weight.

What is not set out in the policy material is any clear explanation for the distinction it creates. The documents explain why access is provided to complainers. They do not explain why it is not extended to the accused. There is no published assessment of the impact on appeals, and no indication that the position of those maintaining innocence has been addressed as part of the scheme.

The scheme is a Scottish Government policy decision, communicated to Parliament through the Criminal Justice Committee and updated under the name of Angela Constance. The distinction it creates is therefore not incidental. It is part of the current justice policy framework.

In Daly & Keir v HM Advocate [2025] UKSC 38, the UK Supreme Court identified that aspects of Scotland’s approach to sexual offence trials were capable of breaching fair trial rights. Access to the trial record sits within that same framework. If a conviction is to be tested, the material required to test it must be accessible.

For a person maintaining innocence, that question is not abstract. It determines whether the record of their own trial can be examined at all without significant financial barrier.

The question that follows is a practical one. On what basis has that distinction been made, and why does it stop at the point where access would assist someone seeking to challenge the outcome of the trial itself?