Posts
The Equal Treatment Bench Book – guidance on fairness for judges
UPDATE 25.03.24: We've now seen that there's a revised 2023 version here. We've just noticed that a revised version of this lengthy document (566 pages!) has been issued online, so we looked for any references to transparency. What we found is brief and out of date....
Authorities seeking to silence families?
On 24 November, the BBC broadcast the story above. The Court of Protection (CoP) judgment, PH & Anor v Brighton And Hove City Council [2021] EWCOP 63, has now been published on BAILII. The full name of the case is: PH and RH v (1) Brighton and Hove City Council...
Griffiths v Tickle – a lawyer’s view
This post originally appeared on the author's blog Pink Tape and is reposted here with permission (NB, disclosure : the author is the Chair of The Transparency Project). Most of the newspapers carried the story on Saturday: 'Andrew Griffiths found to have raped his...
Membership of the Transparency Implementation Group announced
Today, the Ministry of Justice has announced the makeup of the TIG - the Transparency Implementation Group who will take forward the recommendations made in the President’s Review published at the end of October, that we wrote about here. The group is appropriately...
Speaking out in the public interest and children’s privacy rights? The Eleanor Bradford adoption breakdown saga
Media stories this week of an adoption breakdown, from the perspective of an adoptive mother who felt she had no option but to ask for her older child (15) to return to care, have provoked lots of comment, some of it scathing. We’ve gathered the reports and broadcasts...
‘Far too often survivors and their children have been let down and retraumatised through the process and it is one of my utmost priorities to change this’
This is a quote from the website of the UK Domestic Abuse Commissioner, Nicole Jacobs, on the release of ‘Improving the family court response to domestic abuse’, a 29-page report on her work to date on establishing a mechanism to monitor the way allegations of...
Open Justice Inquiry – Read the written evidence
The Justice Committee is currently conducting an inquiry : Open justice: court reporting in the digital age The inquiry is not specific to family justice but it does encompass issues of relevance to the Family Court - so we made written submissions. One of our core...
Financial Remedies Transparency Proposals – Our Response
Alongside the main Transparency Review report, the lead judges of the Financial Remedies Court also published a consultation last month seeking views on a proposed 'reporting permission order' that is envisaged for regulating access to and use of documents by...
Judges publishing porn
'What?' I hear you ask, your face crunched up as you read the title of this post. Yes, you read it correctly. On 24 November 2021, approximately 3 years after the publication of detailed anonymisation guidance warning against the publication of overly graphic sexual...
MORE TRANSPARENCY IN THE FINANCIAL REMEDIES COURT
This is a guest post from Sir James Munby. Sir James is the previous President of the Family Division. Hard on the heels of the CONSULTATION ON A PROPOSAL FOR A STANDARD REPORTING PERMISSION ORDER IN FINANCIAL REMEDY PROCEEDINGS published by Mostyn J and HHJ Hess, the...