Posts
Family Court Reporting Watch Roundup: August-Sept 2025
Welcome to the Roundup, where we correct, clarify and comment on media reports of family law, explain and comment on published family court judgments, and highlight other transparency news. MEDIA COVERAGE OF FAMILY LAW, TRANSPARENCY etc The Financial Times posed the...
Judgment given and published in Welsh
Thanks to Alex Ruck-Keene who noticed last week that BAILII had published a Court of Protection judgment by HHJ Edwards in Cardiff in the Welsh language. It's TIRE (by her Litigation Friend LK) v Carmarthenshire County Council [2024] EWCOP 81 (T2). Alex's comment is...
Updated Guidance: What to do when a reporter attends your hearing
We first published our Guidance Note 'What to do when a reporter attends (or wants to attend) your hearing' in 2023. Later, we updated it to account for the expansion of the Reporting Pilot and introduction of the Financial Remedies Pilot, developing two versions, one...
Will my Family Court judgment be published?
This post was amended on 25 September to add a new link on the Judiciary website. We recently received an enquiry from someone who wanted a court judgment in their case to be published and who didn't know how to go about this. [EDITED 22.09.25 to clarify this post is...
British teenager becomes a ward of court to escape from Somalia
We spotted this dramatic court judgment published last week although, surprisingly, we’ve not seen any media coverage – Re M (Nationality Based Jurisdiction) [2025] EWHC 1821 (Fam). There are a few similarities with the widely publicised case in July of the 14 year...
A happy ending in Cardiff Family Court
During August, I attended a final hearing in a case I’d written about in May, when I’d said: The circumstances in this case may sound all too familiar to some readers. A child aged ten was terrified of his mother’s violent male partner and is now living with his...
Children left with harmful parents because of lack of foster carers
A local authority (LA) applied for care orders for six children in March 2025. At the case management hearing (CMH) I attended in April, and wrote on here: ‘Completing care proceedings in less that 26 weeks’, a strict timetable was set out by the judge to ensure...
Sending a mother to prison for contempt of court
This post by Celia Kitzinger on the Open Justice Court of Protection Project site, 'Sentencing in contempt proceedings', is actually a Family Court case. Celia explains why the hearing caught her eye in the lists, how she observed it, and why she has written about it...
Family Court Reporting Watch Roundup: July 2025
Welcome to the Roundup, where we correct, clarify and comment on media reports of family law, explain and comment on published family court judgments, and highlight other transparency news. MEDIA COVERAGE OF FAMILY LAW, TRANSPARENCY etc The BBC reported that 'I...
14 year old boy taken to Ghana – Appeal judgment
In June, the Court of Appeal allowed the appeal by a 14 year old boy against a High Court decision that his parents had lawfully taken him from his home in the UK to Ghana, where he’d been left at a boarding school. You can read Sanchia Berg’s story here. We included...