Yesterday, the President of the Family Division published his anticipated guidance and consultation on transparency issues. The guidance had been promised by the President in the course of Transparency Project member Louise Tickle’s successful appeal against a reporting restriction order which we wrote about at the time (see the judgment in Re R here).
The guidance is in draft form and open for consultation until 30 June – it deals with practical procedural issues around the attendance of both journalists and legal bloggers at private family hearings, to make things run more smoothly and effectively – in particular how to deal with requests to publish information that would otherwise be restricted.
Also, in his ‘View 2’ the President also announces a wider Transparency Review which will run for a period of 9 months and report next year. That is interesting and exciting news.
It seems implicit from these documents that at least pending evaluation and receipt and consideration of consultation responses the plug is not about to be pulled on the legal blogging pilot. It is currently scheduled to end on 30 June but we anticipate that it will probably be extended in due course for a further period, as other pilots often are (barring catastrophic problems).
It’s really encouraging to see that the new President is grasping the very tricky nettle of transparency and that these issues are going to be given a thorough look over. There aren’t any simple solutions and it is right that the President takes time to think about all options before deciding how best to balance the competing needs and rights involved.
The TP will (obviously) be responding to the consultation once we’ve had time to digest the draft guidance. We will publish our response (and link to any others we see published) on this site in due course.
We will write more in due course, but in the meantime the documents can all be found here.
TRANSPARENCY ISN’T GOING AWAY – COME TO OUR WORKSHOP NEXT WEEK TO FIND OUT MORE
Next Wednesday our chair Lucy Reed will be running a workshop for lawyers on the issues around journalists and legal bloggers attending family court hearings – the workshop will incorporate consideration of these new developments but bookings must close on Friday. For further information or to book please see our eventbrite page here.
Feature pic : Thomas Hawk on Flickr (Creative Commons) – thanks!
Whilst I agree more transparency is needed in the family court, you can bet anything you like, that the president will ban any reportings on the ineptness and bias of Cafcass and Guardians. You can also bet that the president will cover up how in favour psychologists are towards Cafcass and Guardians and also cover up how those psychologists will step to any level, to gain more work for themselves. I dare say that the president will also ban any reportings of conflicting evidence, such as that the RP will be lying, whereas the NRP will be telling the truth.
I definitely agree that more transparency is required in the family court. However, I do think that achieving this can be more difficult than expected and like you said, will take longer than anticipated to achieve.