Posts
Family Court Reporting Watch Roundup: May 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 Observer ran a piece...
Child protection and domestic abuse – a legal blogging report from Cardiff Family Court
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 grandparents. The local authority (LA) had applied for an interim care order (ICO). The good news...
Can secret recordings be used as evidence in court?
If you record a meeting or conversation about your children, without people being aware you’re recording them, can you then produce and rely on that recording as part of your evidence to a family court? This is a question that has been hanging around for several years...
Cross examination of medical experts – exceptional or exceptionally important?
What this post is about When medical expert witnesses are instructed in family cases, usually to help work out how an injury to a child was caused, their evidence can sometimes be accepted by all the parties, in which case the expert doesn’t need to attend court to...
Family Court Reporting Watch Roundup: April 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 the sad...
ASSISTED DYING: WHAT ROLE FOR THE PANEL? Thoughts on the latest (amended) proposals
Sir James Munby expresses his serious concerns over current legislative proposals for judicial involvement in the approval of assisted dying decisions and over the lack of public scrutiny that the process might permit.
Happy Tenth Birthday to TP!
In fact, like the Queen, The Transparency Project has two birthdays. One in early 2014, when we emerged from the primordial online soup into a loose multi-cellular organism, and one when we were officially formed as a charity on 29 April 2015, with charitable...
Completing care proceedings in less than 26 weeks
I went to Cardiff Family Court as a legal blogger in two care cases this week. Reporting on them might give an inkling into how the most recent ‘refocus’ on the Public Law Outline (PLO) 26 weeks time limit is working out in the real world. We wrote about the refocus...
Abbasi – the Supreme Court finally hands down judgment on appeal about injunctions made to protect the identity of hospital staff providing end of life care
A significant judgment about transparency was handed down by the Supreme Court this week - Abbasi and another v Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust [2025] UKSC 15. The case of Abbasi has been very long running, as has the case of Haastrup that has...
Exhumation where father’s coercive control undermined decision on place of burial
This is a guest post by Frank Cranmer, reposted from the Law & Religion UK blog, about a matter of ecclesiastical law which overlaps with family law. It concerns the grant of a faculty, which is an order granted by the Consistory Court for a particular Church of...