Santa has brought a whole sackful of transparency related goodies for us to report on.
The stocking fillers are
- The Transparency and Open Justice Board’s call for views on its proposed Key Objectives (yes, this is the board announced some months ago, but judicial super committees are not especially agile) – we will respond in due course as we think they could do with a tweak as they refer only to public hearings which seemingly excludes discussion of transparency in courts which sit in private. You can have your say – deadline is 28 February.
- The National Audit Office is conducting an inquiry into ‘Improving Family Court Services for Children’. The webpage tells us that the project will ‘examine whether the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and other bodies involved in the family court system in England and Wales are managing the service efficiently and effectively to improve outcomes for children. It will look at the extent to which MoJ and others:
- understand demand and capacity within the family court system across England and Wales
- have adopted a whole system approach to improve family courts performance
- understand and account for the needs of different groups within the family courts system.’ (The answers they produce to those questions could be interesting….)
Beneath the tree though are two other important looking boxes.
Reporting from family courts
First, today sees the publication of the much anticipated practice directions and statutory instruments through which the ‘Reporting Pilot’ will both be expanded to cover ALL COURTS in England and Wales so that reporting of (most) children cases will usually be permitted, subject only to anonymisation, and will become a formal and permanent feature of the set-up, rather than a trial run that could be nixed. The terms of the new PDs are almost identical to the Pilot, but the nerds amongst you may find them here. The commencement date is 27 January 2025, and as with the pilot, the new PDs will take effect first for public law cases (not magistrates) on that date, to private law cases in May (not magistrates), and to Magistrates (public and private) later in the year. But come the end of 2025 all children cases will be covered (apart from limited excluded types of hearings/case).
Ten years ago, when The Transparency Project was just forming, this would have been unthinkable (for a reminder of the tenor of public debate of the issue see here – sadly the Judiciary website has weeded out the full transcript of the debate that this article relates to, which is disappointing). A lot has changed in 10 years, and yet a lot remains the same. These changes are a platform for the spreading and embedding of the cultural change that is really needed to make openness and accountability a normal part of how the family court works, and one that validates good practice as much as it highlights bad practice.
UPDATE: Read Sanchia Berg’s piece for the BBC about the changes here, or listen to our chair Lucy Reed KC on Radio 4 Today programme (20 Dec 2024, c 7.18am).
Anonymising a judge
And secondly, a reminder of the dichotomy of significant progress against a backdrop of continuing deep-rooted cultural antipathy toward full transparency – the reporting and ongoing legal challenges relating to the Family Court’s handling of proceedings concerning little Sara Sharif, whose father and step mother were convicted of murder this week. The efforts of the media to obtain access to the documents in children proceedings involving Sara and her siblings was important, and largely a triumph of transparency (see here). There are important questions to be answered about the Family Court’s role in Sara’s life. We now know that there were three sets of family court proceedings handled by a judge. For perhaps obvious reasons, the media were successful in persuading a High Court Judge (Williams J) to give them access to a substantial amount of documentation about those proceedings, so that some understanding could be gained of how and why Sara was placed in the care of the father and step mother who were ultimately to murder her, in circumstances where it was known that the father may pose a risk of violence to both children and adults. And yet, in approving that disclosure to facilitate the legitimate reporting of the case, Williams J also took the exceptional step of affording anonymity to the original judge, something that reports suggest had not been canvassed prior to the decision’s announcement.
Today we learned that, following a refusal by Williams J of a request for permission to appeal (technically an adjournment of the PTA request pending the reasons for the decision being produced), the Court of Appeal has granted permission to appeal and listed the matter for a 2 day hearing in January (14-15 January) which will be live streamed. See here.
As former Attorney General Lord Wolfson observed on social media, in response to reading about the situation, “There is no such person known to the law as the anonymous Judge” (quoting R v Felixstowe Magistrates). Although the Family Court sits in private, it is very unusual for the judge not to be named. Occasionally we have seen a judgment published without a name in a case where it appears there may be concern about identification by geography but this does not apply here.. When Lieven J permitted reporting of the Finley Boden case the media were permitted to name the lay magistrates and legal adviser, a case where (like Sara’s) it might reasonably have been anticipated there would be substantial media attention to the decision making because a child had died and the media were applying for access to documents in concluded family court proceedings. Why is the decision different here? We do not yet know because we have not seen Williams J’s reasons, but we expect them to be published soon and subsequently to be scrutinised by the Court of Appeal. Watch this space.
We have a small favour to ask!
The Transparency Project is a registered charity in England & Wales run largely by volunteers who also have full-time jobs. We’re working hard to secure extra funding so that we can keep making family justice clearer for all who use the court and work within it.
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Thanks for reading!