Amidst all the concern about the anonymisation of the family court judges in the historical decisions made about placing Sara Sharif with her father, we should not lose sight of the fact that Mr Justice Williams allowed the media extensive access to documents that related to those family court proceedings. We have been provided with copies of relevant documents on a confidential basis and we are allowed to report on these. However, there are more than 1000 pages of these and we haven’t yet had time to study them all in detail.
It is already public knowledge that family court proceedings about Sara’s older siblings, and later including her, began more than 10 years ago and there had been a magistrates courts emergency decision and a number of decisions by family court judges. It is also in the public domain that the decision for Sara to go to live with her father and stepmother in 2019 was based on agreement having been given to this arrangement by Sara’s mother. Of course, consent by Sara’s mother needs to be placed in context.
The BBC have reported again today on the case, now the judges can be named, here.
Having the benefit of access to all these papers, we hope to be able to write about the historical events in due course, from our perspective and first hand experience. At this stage, we have not seen anything in the documents to suggest any individual errors or mistakes or systemic failures, but they need careful examination.
We therefore hope that the publicity that will now follow the judges being identified will not create misinformation or undue speculation about those individual decisions and what might have been predicted at that time. Genuine transparency and scrutiny requires careful consideration.
It was also announced today that judges in general and their families are to be offered improved security protection.