Posts
The Harm Report – one year on
June 2021 sees the first anniversary of publication of the report 'Assessing risk of harm to children and parents in private law children cases' (the Harm report). We have published a number of posts about the report. The UK government responded to the report that...
Bell v Tavistock – The Court of Appeal hearing
On 23 and 24 June 2021, the Court of Appeal heard the appeal of Bell v Tavistock. The hearing was live streamed on YouTube. At the time of writing, the videos are still available online and can be found here. We reported on the judgment of the lower court at the end...
Court transparency: academic and policy updates
Can transparency be in the limelight? Perhaps not, in scientific terms (or to avoid metaphor mixing), but court transparency is certainly having a moment. This is partly because of changes to the justice process expedited by COVID-19 and the...
Re I-A: Court of Appeal considers adoption and the inherent jurisdiction
Last week, the Court of Appeal heard yet another case where a birth parent was trying to get an adoption order set aside. The three children in Re I-A are, unusually but very fortunately, all living together in one adoptive family, following care and placement orders...
Dodgy drug test results
Four years ago we wrote about news reports of a police investigation into a drug testing lab that had carried out tests for the Family Court : https://www.transparencyproject.org.uk/police-investigating-drug-testing-lab-that-carried-out-tests-for-the-family-court/ The...
Plan for publication of judgments by The National Archives: what will become of BAILII?
This week the Ministry of Justice announced its plans for the archiving and publication of judgments in a comprehensive new national database to be managed by The National Archives (TNA). Till now, the main official collection of court judgments has been the British...
Headlines from the latest Cafcass Open Board Meeting: the emergency protocol, domestic abuse, and young people’s views on transparency
At the latest Cafcass Open Board Meeting we asked about news that Cafcass are starting to trigger their prioritisation protocol and open allocation hubs for private law cases in some areas, and for an update on handling of domestic abuse cases. The Family Justice...
Domestic abuse: incorrect principles applied – successful appeal
This blog post is about the case of Re A (Domestic Abuse: Incorrect Principles applied) [2021] EWFC B30. First, the context: June 2020: The Ministry of Justice published the ‘Harm Report’, a 200-page document detailing criticisms of the way family courts minimised...
Evaluation of family court anonymisation guidance published
Last month Dr Julia Brophy, Marisol Smith with Jagbir Jhutti-Johal published an evaluation of the implementation of the President of the Family Division's 2018 guidance on anonymisation of judgments. That guidance was based upon earlier work by Dr Brophy which itself...
Day to day data on remote hearings in the family courts
HM Courts and Tribunals Service have recently published statistics about the number of hearings conducted remotely, ie by audio, video or on paper, compared with physical in-person hearings, over the course of the coronavirus lockdown. The statistics cover civil and...