Why we hardly ever see published family court judgments

by reporting watch team | Mar 31, 2023 | FCReportingWatch, Transparency News

Amidst the attention being paid to the courts in the Reporting Pilot, especially the series of broadcasts on the BBC Today programme by Sanchia Berg recently, other outputs from the President’s Transparency Implementation Group (TIG) have been slowly emerging....

The Transparency Reporting Pilot: FAQs for legal bloggers

by reporting watch team | Mar 18, 2023 | FCReportingWatch, Legal blogging, Reporting Pilot, Transparency News

On 2nd February 2023, we ran training for prospective legal bloggers interested in taking part in the Transparency Reporting Pilot. During that training, we received some thoughtful questions which we thought helpful to condense into one blog post, as well as some...

Re Z: A family court decision to share serious abuse findings with Social Work England (with guidance)

by Malvika Jaganmohan | Mar 12, 2023 | Analysis, Cases, Explanation, FCReportingWatch

Last month, there was a fair bit of media interest around a High Court battle before Mrs Justice Knowles involving a senior social worker who had been found by the family court to have perpetrated domestic abuse towards his ex-partner. HHJ Ahmed, the judge...

‘Somewhere in the history of this case we have lost our humanity’

by Julie Doughty | Mar 5, 2023 | Cases, Comment, Explanation, FCReportingWatch

This is an update on a case I wrote about in September last year – ‘Choosing the course which is less stressful to the child’. The hearing before Mrs Justive Lieven last summer concerned applications for care orders by Warwickshire County Council in...

Deprivation of Liberty and the black mirror

by Jack Harrison | Mar 2, 2023 | Analysis, Cases, FCReportingWatch

Is removing a mobile phone and access to social media a deprivation of a child’s liberty, or just something that a parent should be entitled to do? Mr Justice Macdonald gives us his answer in Manchester City Council v. P (Refusal of restrictions on mobile phone)...

Family Courts scrutinised by the press – but what do we think of the reporting so far?

by Lucy R | Feb 23, 2023 | Cases, Explanation, FCReportingWatch, Legal blogging, Reporting Pilot

Nobody who has ever read a newspaper or visited twitter would be expecting new media coverage of the family court, made possible by the ‘reporting pilot’, to be in glowing terms. However, the pilot isn’t a PR exercise, and for transparency to mean anything, we have to...