THE Justice Secretary claimed yesterday he was “very confident” that judges would be acting in the interests of justice if they decided to hold Britain’s first ever secret terror trial.

Speaking to the BBC’s Today programme, Chris Grayling said that while the “default” in the justice should be transparency, the law allowed “very rare occasions” where judges could decide to hold trials or parts of trials in private or “in camera.”

The Court of Appeal is considering a challenge from media organisations to orders made at the Old Bailey relating to the trial of two unnamed defendants, identified only as AB and CD, to be held behind closed doors.

It is the first time that such an order has been obtained to conduct an entire trial of this kind in secret, with the identity of both defendants withheld and a permanent prohibition on reporting proceedings.

Plans to introduce secret trials were met with outrage by civil liberties groups, human rights lawyers and a number of high-profile members of the judiciary when they were first announced in 2010.

Opponents accuse the government of eroding centuries of British justice and seeking to put itself above the law.

Director of civil liberties body Liberty Shami Chakrabarti said the case risked setting “a very dangerous precedent.”

“It is just not justice,” Ms Charkabarti said. “The dangers of this kind of process are obvious, in terms of fairness and public confidence in a decent justice system.

“This may be an enormous precedent, but this contagion of secret justice has been spreading through our legal system since before 9/11, and each time the authorities either legislate or apply to the court for further secrecy, we are told this is exceptional, and before you know it you wake up one morning and the exceptional has become routine.”

Labour MP David Winnick, of the Commons home affairs committee, said he said he understood why some of the evidence might need to be heard in private, “but to take the whole case in private is, to say the least, unfortunate.”