When the Courtroom Doors Open.

The principle that justice is administered in public was given its canonical statement more than a century ago in Scott v Scott [1913] AC 417, where the House of Lords held that a hearing in private was the rare exception and never the rule. It is a constitutional value, not a procedural courtesy: justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done. Sunlight disciplines judges, deters perjury, and lets the public satisfy itself that the law is applied evenly.

But a trust dispute is a different animal. When a family falls into litigation over a settlement, the court file fills with precisely the material the structure was built to keep private: the identity of beneficiaries, the size and composition of the fund, the settlor’s letter of wishes, the health and frailties of the people involved. Open justice, applied without qualification, turns a private family arrangement into a public spectacle.

How a jurisdiction resolves that tension tells you a great deal. The recent decision In the matter of the D, E, F, G and H Trusts [2026] CIGC (FSD) 36 is a careful, well-reasoned example of the discretionary model. The Grand Court reaffirmed that open justice is the default — a fundamental constitutional and common-law principle anchored in the fair-trial guarantee of the Cayman Islands Constitution Order 2009 — and that it may be displaced only where doing so is necessary and proportionate in the interests of justice.

Building on In the matter of the A Trusts [2025] CIGC (FSD) 16, the court applied what is in substance a three-part test: does the case fall within a recognised gateway for departing from open justice; are the confidentiality measures sought necessary and proportionate; and is there a countervailing public interest in disclosure? The Cayman courts will, on a proper application, grant confidentiality and anonymisation orders, and trustees can take genuine comfort from that.

But look closely at where the burden sits. Privacy in this model is something a party must apply for, justify, and win. The settlor does not hold it as of right; it is conferred — or withheld — at the end of a balancing exercise the applicant does not control, against a public-interest thumb that can press the other way. Privacy that depends on persuading a judge is privacy you can lose.

Nevis took a different road. Rather than leave confidentiality to be litigated case by case, it wrote it into the governing ordinance as the default condition of trust litigation. What a Cayman applicant must assemble evidence to achieve, § 63 of the Nevis International Exempt Trust Ordinance, Cap. 7.03(N) supplies in one short section:

There is no application to make and no balancing test to satisfy. Civil trust proceedings are closed by statute. Section 63(1) reinforces the point by importing the Confidential Relationships Act, Cap. 21.02, which makes the unauthorised disclosure of confidential trust information a criminal offence — privacy backed not merely by a costs order but by the criminal law.

Belize reaches the same destination by a parallel route. § 28(2) of the Belize Trusts Act, Cap. 202 imposes on the trustee a positive statutory duty:

And § 65C shields the Register of International Trusts from public inspection altogether — the Registrar may not disclose register information without the trustee’s written authorisation — with § 63B doing the same for the Domestic Trust Register. There is no public window into a Belize trust to begin with. The contrast with Cayman is not one of degree but of architecture: there, confidentiality is an outcome the court may grant; here, it is a premise the law supplies.

Set the three side by side and the distinction is clean. In Cayman, the default posture is open justice and privacy is obtained by application — the burden falls on the party seeking it, and a public-interest balancing can defeat the order. In Nevis, civil proceedings are heard in camera by force of § 63(2), with the Confidential Relationships Act standing behind it as a criminal backstop. In Belize, a statutory duty of non-disclosure binds the trustee under § 28(2) and the register is sealed under § 65C. In the two firewall jurisdictions the protection is built into the regime; in Cayman it is a remedy to be earned.

None of this is a promise of secrecy, and the firm would not frame it as one. Statutory confidentiality yields — properly — to genuine criminal investigation and to the legitimate enforcement rights of bona fide creditors; a trust is a private structure, not a black hole. The point is narrower and more durable than secrecy: it is about who bears the burden. In a discretionary jurisdiction, the settlor must win privacy every time the structure is tested. In Nevis and Belize, the settlor starts with it, and it is the party seeking disclosure who must dislodge a statutory default.

For a family deciding where to anchor a structure that may one day be litigated, that distinction is the whole game. Privacy you must argue for is privacy at the mercy of the argument. Privacy written into the ordinance is privacy you own.

The Cayman analysis here follows Mourant, Open justice and privacy: confidentiality orders in trust proceedings, summarising In the matter of the D, E, F, G and H Trusts [2026] CIGC (FSD) 36 and In the matter of the A Trusts [2025] CIGC (FSD) 16. The Nevis and Belize provisions are quoted from the consolidated text of the respective ordinances.