Posts
Fight for Life: Best interests, sick children and the Battleground
Manchester University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and M (Acting by her Children's Guardian) and OA In the recent case of Manchester University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust v OA , the court had to decide the fate of a 13-month-old-girl, known as M, who was...
Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they’re out to sue me…
The Transparency Project was founded in part to counter dodgy headlines and over-simplified or inaccurate media reports about all things family law. Every so often, distortion of what a case *really* says or means comes from within the system. This is one such...
It ain’t that easy…
This is a guest post from Themis (pseudonym), a parent with experience of the family courts. It was originally sent to us as a comment in response to our post A Plea for Help, in which we put out a call for writers. We felt it deserved its own post: Must be a bit...
How do family courts use ‘barring orders’?
One of the tasks of the new review of family courts and domestic abuse announced last month by the MoJ is to examine courts’ use of barring orders. (By the way, we don't know when the three months for the review starts, although we are now three weeks in from the...
How does the family court deal with domestic abuse? A snapshot – Part 2
This is Part 2. You can read Part 1 here. A (A Child) [2019] EWFC B16 (12 March 2019) In this case, the court was making a final decision in care proceedings. The decision to be made was whether a child could be cared for by both of his parents, just his mother...
How does the family court deal with domestic abuse? A snapshot
This is a first post from Sophie Smith-Holland, one of our new contributors. Sophie tweets as @SSmithHolland. The post is divided into two parts. This is Part One. The question of how the Family Court deals with domestic abuse has had a huge amount of public...
New What Works Centre proposals to evaluate Family Group Conferences for children on the edge of care: A call for dialogue
https://twitter.com/robin_23_99/status/1135511461760000000 For anyone else wondering what this tweet was all about, here's what we've made of it so far. Family Group Conferences (FGCs) are family-led planning meetings. Their use is well established in child protection...
Do social workers have a duty of care to protect children of local authority tenants?
You can tell this was likely to be an important case because there are five ‘interverners’ – organisations that have an interest, in principle, in the outcome – in this particular case, from a human rights and children’s rights perspective. The applicants were two...
Independent research on domestic abuse and family courts
In the Victoria Derbyshire television programme on 16 May, Sir James Munby, the former President of the Family Division, acknowledged (via a written statement) the weight of expressions of dissatisfaction and concern that was building up about orders for contact...
![Money, money, money, must be funny, in an [anonymised beneficiary’s] world: protecting child beneficiaries in variation of trust cases](https://transparencyproject.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/adolescence-adorable-baby-1089069-1080x675.jpg)
Money, money, money, must be funny, in an [anonymised beneficiary’s] world: protecting child beneficiaries in variation of trust cases
A typical plot development in old novels is the sudden discovery of unexpected wealth, usually in the form of an inheritance, or the discovery of a long lost will or hidden relationship to a wealthy benefactor. That is sometimes what it...