Posts
The Satanic Cult that Wasn’t
This is a thorough, thoughtful piece by Melanie Griffiths, broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s ‘The Report’ on Thursday. It looks at how campaigners misinterpreted allegations of parental child abuse as evidence of concealed ritual satanic abuse, sent it viral and caused harm....
Speaker Bios
Here are brief details of the speakers/participants at the Multidisciplinary Conference on 1 June Cathy Ashley – Chief Executive of Family Rights Group, England and Wales Family Rights Group (www.frg.org.uk) is the charity in England and Wales that advises and...
More harm than good
One goal of the Transparency Project is to provide balanced and accurate information about the family courts, so people can make up their own minds on topics that often (rightly) provoke debate, or even protest. This can feel particularly useful if the press have just...
Jigsaw Identification – putting the pieces back into the box
We've been having some discussions behind the scenes about jigsaw identification here at TP recently. Not very transparent I grant you, but the problem is that our discussions have centred upon some judgments that one commenter was anxious might have given away a...
DIY justice
This is both a summary and a review of BBC’s flagship current affairs programme, Panorama, which last week tackled the issue of legal aid cuts and the phenomenal rise in the number of litigants in person (LIPs) now using the courts in civil and family cases. The...
The changes are organic and ongoing
('Organic' - characterised by gradual or natural development – OED) So say the Court of Appeal, in a judgment given in a case called Re C (A Child) on 24 March; the full judgment has not yet been published. The judges in this case commented that there had been a move...
A striking headline : Construction tycoon left ‘homeless’ after ex-wife wins 80% of his property in divorce
This case about a financial claim on divorce hit the mainstream media recently (see for example The Telegraph here. The case involved a millionaire divorcee Barry Stocker. At first blush it seems surprising that either one of a wealthy couple should be "left too poor...
Jigsaw Identification
This is a guest post by "Judi". Judi is a parent who has been through the Family Court who has acted as a Litigant in Person and McKenzie Friend. Once upon a time, in this land places called courts used to have public counters that opened reasonable hours, where...
W(h)ither Transparency?
It has been a long time since the President of the Family Division first published his "Next Steps" Transparency Consultation (August 2014) and an even longer time since he took his first steps in that direction, with the publication at the outset of 2014 of the...
The final report of the Vulnerable Witnesses and Children Working Group
This report was published this week on behalf of a group chaired by two High Court judges, Mr Justice Hayden and Ms Justice Russell. What does it have to do with transparency? Well, this (paragraph 34): ‘The need for greater transparency has been a leitmotif of recent...