Transparency Project becomes a charity

We’ve taken the first steps towards becoming a real grown up project. This week our constitution was signed and trustees appointed (Lucy Reed, Sarah Phillimore and Julie Doughty) and our documents have gone off to the Charity Commission to be processed so that...

Anonymous Committals

Lucy Reed has blogged about a recent case where a person committed to prison for contempt of court was initially anonymous due to a reporting restriction order made by a Family Division Judge. The order has now been varied. You can read Lucy’s blog post on Pink...

Podcastarama

Sarah Phillimore and Lucy Reed have created a podcast in which they use the recent “Protection” episode of Silent Witness as a discussion point, to engage with issues around child protection and family justice. This is a first podcast for the Transparency...

The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers

‘If I wait for evidence it can be too late’ – when dramatic licence goes too far   I watched the first half of Silent Witness: Protection on Wednesday via iplayer and smiled indulgently at some of the more anguished twitter responses to its...

The curious case of the judge with no name

There is an assumption in some parts of the media that the Family Courts are deliberately operating in a secretive manner in order to cover up the sinister conduct of social workers, doctors, and local authorities, and that is why hearings are held in private (ie in...