The Covid lockdown period provided unexpected opportunities to discover the advantages and disadvantages of holding court hearings ‘remotely’ online.
Currently, family courts prefer to hold hearings in person but there’s a general move toward more cases being heard ‘virtually’ in the future.
There is now an Online Procedure Rule Committee which works alongside the Civil Procedure Rule Committee and the Family Court Rule Committee. A consultation was held about the rules for this new Online Committee during December – January. While these initial rules are about housing possession cases, they will form a basis for other types of civil (i.e. not criminal) courts and tribunals.
We responded on some issues about potential vulnerability of parties in family court proceedings and our concern about quite a weak commitment to public access to proceedings. We emphasised that the open justice principle applies across all jurisdictions, including family court hearings held in private. Just because privacy may have added weight in family court cases, doesn’t mean that open justice and public understanding aren’t important.
On transparency and open justice, the draft rule is: The powers of the court or tribunal to achieve the Overriding Objective include….. (g) allowing reasonable public access to court and tribunal decision-making.
Click here to read our (brief) response.
And on a similar theme, here is a powerful message from the Open Justice Court of Protection Project about the powers of the Online Committee to further enhance public access to court proceedings.
We hope that the term ‘reasonable’ will be replaced by a clear commitment to open justice.
Image: thanks Nina Stojkovic creative commons at flickr
We have a small favour to ask!
TEN YEARS A CHARITY
The Transparency Project is a registered charity in England and Wales run by volunteers who mostly also have full-time jobs. Although we’ve now been going for a decade, we’re always working to secure extra funding so that we can keep making family justice clearer for all who use the court and work in it.
We can’t do what we do without help from you!
We’d be really grateful if you were able to help us by making a small one-off (or regular!) donation through our Just Giving page