Five commitments, publicly held.

Independence is the precondition of everything else. Without it, no claim of fairness can be sustained. We accept no money from the companies we document, no advertising, no sponsored content, no consulting arrangements with the industries whose conduct may come under our review.

We charge consumers no success fee. We take no percentage of damages. The work is funded independently of the parties it concerns — by means transparent enough that no party in any dispute can claim we were aligned with the other.

We are accountable to the integrity of our own work, and to no commercial interest beyond it.

An allegation is a claim. A document is evidence. The two are not interchangeable, and the difference is the difference between an internet complaint and a serious case.

We work only with what can be substantiated. Emails, contracts, receipts, photographs, communications, transaction records, official correspondence — the material that exists outside the dispute itself, and that holds up when read by someone who was not there.

This is not a position against the consumer. It is the protection of the consumer. A case built on documentation moves. A case built on impression alone does not.

No case proceeds without the company first being given the opportunity to address it. This is not a courtesy. It is a structural requirement of fair process, and the foundation of every claim we make about the documentation we produce.

The company receives the case file in full, the resolution proposal we have prepared, and a stated period within which to respond. Their response is read in full, taken into account, and recorded alongside the case.

Where no response is given, that fact, too, is recorded. We do not interpret silence. We document it.

The quality of an organisation is set by what it refuses, not by what it accepts. A platform that takes everything is a database. A platform that chooses is something else.

We choose. Every submission is reviewed. Many are not accepted. The criteria are internal and remain so — not from secrecy as a pose, but because criteria, once published, become the target of strategic submissions and the tool of those who wish to game the system.

What we will say is this: we look for documented disputes where a serious matter has gone unaddressed, where the consumer's position is reasonable, where the company has been given a fair chance to act, and where MediaJudge is a proportionate route. Acceptance is not a finding on the merits. It is a finding that the case meets the threshold for our review.

A case is not ours. It belongs to the person who lived it. We help structure the documentation, prepare the file, put a proposal to the company, and stand ready to support the public step. But the case — the experience, the harm, the decision about what to do with it — remains with them.

This is also why we do not publish on behalf of consumers. The decision to make a matter public is a serious one, and the right to make that decision belongs to the person concerned, not to us.

And this is why our position is what it is. We stand on the side of fairness, not on the side of either party. In most cases, fairness brings us alongside the consumer. Sometimes it does not. Where the documented facts indicate that a complaint is unreasonable or that a company has acted appropriately, we say so — and the case does not proceed.