In May, the President of the Family Division published draft guidance to help those dealing with applications by reporters to relax reporting restrictions. The President published that draft guidance for consultation purposes and we’ve now submitted our response, in which we welcome the guidance and make some constructive suggestions.
Just as the 30 June deadline for consultation responses fell due we received notification that PD36J, the ‘legal blogging pilot’ has been extended for a further 12 months until end June 2020. This is excellent news, and we hope to publish more soon about how we plan to make the most of this opportunity both to learn how do do court based public legal education blogging well and safely, and to inform the public.
Note to lawyers : even if legal blogging hasn’t reached you yet, and even if you don’t fancy trying your hand as a legal blogger yourself, it may be coming to a court near you soon. To that end we’ve already been running workshops for lawyers about journalists and legal bloggers coming to Family Courts – if you’d like to host a workshop near you please let us know and we’ll see what we can sort out. In the meantime, you can read more about the legal blogging pilot here.
You can read our consultation response here.
We’ll be gathering consultation responses together here, and will update the list below as we become aware of more published responses. Here are the other responses we know about so far, with links or downloads where possible :
- Louise Tickle, Journalist
- Dr Julie Doughty, Cardiff University (one of our trustees)
- Association of Lawyers for Children
- Magistrates’ Association
- NAGALRO
- BASW (British Association of Social Workers) have confirmed they have responded but their response is not published.
- Family Law Bar Association have responded but their response is not yet on their website.
We think that the following are likely to have responded but we don’t have a link or a file to upload :
- Association of Media Lawyers
- BBC
- Society of Editors
- Press Association
- Resolution
- Law Society
Feature pic : Open and Closed by Andrew Rose on Flickr – creative commons – thanks!
The list of who might have responded is too narrow. Specifically no mention of social workers who as a profession and on behalf of the parents, children and other carers have an interest in the balance struck between the need for openness and the privacy of individuals. I know that BASW has responded. I would imaging Cafcass, NAGALRO and ADCS would too,