Posts
Prison threat for “gran jailed over a hug”
New prison threat for gran who was jailed over a hug: Pensioner could be locked up again after helping her granddaughter to escape from a care home Court order prevents contact between Kathleen Danby and granddaughter In 2014 Mrs Danby, 74, was sent to jail after...
Former MP John Hemming urges appeals court to look in to case of teenager related to public figure
A story under this headline appeared on the Your Local Guardian site on 8 August : Former MP John Hemming urges appeals court to look in to case of teenager related to public figure. It suggests that ex-MP John Hemming is going to be launching an appeal to the Court...
Two million things wrong with this headline…
Child killer's £2m legal aid: How taxpayers funded Ellie Butler's warped father's battle for custody of the little girl he went on to murder Ben Butler, 36, was given a 'blank cheque' by taxpayers to fund his lawyers Ellie's loving grandparents left penniless after...
The “secret” transparency pilot
Although it was announced quite openly, and written about here on this blog, we suspect that the Court of Protection's transparency pilot scheme has not actually resulted in any attendance of cases by members of the public unconnected with a case. One reason for this...
Ellie Butler – the missing judgment about her sibling
We have previously written about the tragic case of Ellie Butler a number of times on this blog : Ellie Butler - drawing together some strands and discussions Ellie Butler - some useful resources Lessons from the Ellie Butler Case Lucy Reed also wrote a post on Pink...
New opportunities for the Transparency Project
We're very excited to announce that The Transparency Project has secured its first real chunk of grant funding, meaning we can move onto a new level in the work that we do. The brilliant Legal Education Foundation have awarded us a grant of £49,500 to fund two...
The Chair of the Family Law Bar Association on Transparency
Our chair Lucy Reed recently interviewed Philip Marshall QC, Chair of the Family Law Bar Association, for Counsel Magazine. She managed to squeeze in a question about transparency, and here is the relevant extract : Although he hasn’t mentioned it as a hot topic, I...
Lessons from the Ellie Butler Case
Lessons from the Ellie Butler Case - Event on October 3rd 2016 Members of the Transparency Project will be speaking at an event organised by the London Regional Group of Resolution on October 3rd entitled 'Lessons from the Ellie Butler Case'. The venue is Charles...
The state of transparency: what happens when anonymisation safeguards fail?
Our FOI request The Transparency Project has been concerned for some time about judgments from family cases being published where the anonymisation was incomplete or non-existent. Since formation we have regularly noticed or been notified of such anonymisation errors,...
Update on Freedom of Information responses about adoption ‘targets’
We have received around 120 replies so far, from 173 English and Welsh councils asked about adoption performance management (including ‘targets’), under the Freedom of Information Act 2000. This is the second stage of research we began late last year into whether, and...