Category Archives: transparency

There is some corner of a foreign field that is forever not part of the Hague Convention

Posted on March 22, 2014 by suesspiciousminds

 

The quirky case of Leicester City Council v Chhatbar 2014 – which features without a doubt the best application for permission to appeal I’ve ever read

http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Fam/2014/830.html

The parents names are reported in the case because they are freely available to view on the Interpol website  (the Daily Mail attended the hearing and sought that permission to name the parent, which was granted)

    1. On 12th October 2013 at a time when Mr. Chhatbar and Miss Rahman frankly concede they knew that Abdul Rahman was the subject of protective measures, they left England and Wales and travelled to the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. As is well known, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is recognised as an independent state only by Turkey. The rest of the world, and specifically the European Union, regard the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus as being a military occupation by Turkey of part of the Cypriot Republic. The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is not a signatory to the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Effects of Child Abduction, nor does it subscribe to or apply the child abduction provisions of the Brussels II regulation.

 

    1. The court can easily conclude that a motive for these parents taking this child to the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is that, uniquely within Europe, it represents a safe haven from the provisions of the 1980 Hague Convention.

 

  1. The reason I am being asked to determine that on 17th October 2013 when Abdul Rahman was made a ward of court he was habitually resident in England and Wales is not in order to demonstrate that on 12th October 2014 he was unlawfully removed from England and Wales within the terms of Art.3 of the Hague Convention. The reason I am being asked to determine this issue is in order that the local authority would be equipped to argue, should Abdul Rahman ever be taken to a Hague Convention country, that from 17th October 2013 he was being unlawfully retained by the parents in Northern Cyprus. In order for an unlawful retention for the purposes of Art.3 to be proved, it has to be shown that on the relevant date Abdul Rahman was habitually resident here and that at that time rights of custody had been vested in this court. Plainly the latter criterion was satisfied because this court had made him a ward of court on that day. The question is whether on that day he was habitually resident here.

 

If you are going to do a runner then, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is a good destination.  (though read the whole thing before booking your flight)

As it isn’t a signatory to the Hague Convention, there is no straightforward method in international law for compelling the return of the child (there MIGHT be in the law of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, but frankly who knows?).

The City Council asked the High Court to declare that the child had been unlawfully removed from England under article 3 of the Hague Convention, not so they could get the child back from Northern Cyprus, but rather so that if the family set foot in any other bit of Europe, the child COULD be recovered.

Mr. Downs frankly concedes that this exercise only becomes relevant if Abdul Rahman is taken by his parents to a Hague Convention country of which, of course, Turkey is one, the Republic of Cyprus is another, and Greece is yet another. He argues, as does the Council which he represents, that this is a reasonably foreseeable prospect. First, they say that the parents were, in fact, in Turkey as recently as December 2013. They say they went there in 2013 for a holiday. Secondly, they say that in order to be able lawfully to stay in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus they need to leave the country every 90 days in order to re-enter and receive a new 90 day tourist visa.

The Judge heard from the parents by videolink, considered all of the relevant law and facts and reached this conclusion

    1. In my judgment, on 17th October 2013 both the parents and the child had their habitual residence in England and Wales. They had not severed their integration in this country. Their social and family environment was in England and Wales. Of that I have no doubt. I do not need to speculate further on the motives that drove them to leave to go to Northern Cyprus although pretty easy conclusions can be drawn.

 

  1. I say nothing about the merits of the local authority’s case other than to observe that at the relevant time the father was under an order of probation awarded by a criminal court in relation to an offence of domestic violence. He was obliged under our law to be in this country in order to undergo the period of probation that had been awarded. Beyond that I say nothing about the merits of the steps taken by the local authority. Nor do I want to give anybody any indication of the likelihood of success, should these parents go to a Hague Convention country, of an application under the Hague Convention to such a country for the return of Abdul Rahman to this country. Of that I say nothing at all. I confine myself strictly to saying only that on 17th October 2013 the child, Abdul Rahman Chhatbar was habitually resident in England and Wales.

 

What follows then, is the father’s application to appeal, which I’ll print in full

MR. CHHATBAR: Excuse me.

MR. JUSTICE MOSTYN: Yes.

MR. CHHATBAR: Can we appeal your decision?

MR. JUSTICE MOSTYN: I have given my decision. I have declared that Abdul Rahman was habitually resident in England and Wales on 17th –

MR. CHHATBAR: Yes, I heard all that. We heard all that. We are asking you can we appeal your decision.

MR. JUSTICE MOSTYN: OK. So you need to ask me for permission to appeal.

MR. CHHATBAR: Yes, that is what we are asking.

MR. JUSTICE MOSTYN: I can only give permission if I am satisfied that you have got a real prospect of success or there is some other good reason why an appeal should be heard. Is there anything else you want to say about that?

MR. CHHATBAR: Yes, it is a joke, isn’t it? It is a fraud. It is a fraud mate. It is all a fucking fraud.

MR. JUSTICE MOSTYN: OK.

MR. CHHATBAR: Good luck in trying to find us. Good luck.

MR. JUSTICE MOSTYN: Thank you very much.

MR. CHHATBAR: The court has got no jurisdiction. We are never coming back to England. Good luck. See how powerful you are, yes. You are powerful sitting there in your chair. It is a fucking fraud.

MR. JUSTICE MOSTYN: Thank you very much, Mr. Chhatbar. It is a shame –

MR. CHHATBAR: See if you are a good parent sitting in that chair when your son takes cocaine. You are a joker, my friend, you are a joker.

 

The transcript doesn’t indicate whether there was any pause, and if not, hats off to Mostyn J for his response

MR. JUSTICE MOSTYN: All right. Mr. Chhatbar applies for permission to appeal. Under the Civil Procedure Rules Part 52 the permission can only be given if I am satisfied that there is a real prospect of success or there is some other compelling reason why the appeal should be heard. In as much as I can understand Mr. Chhatbar, he says that my decision is wrong because I have no jurisdiction and because it is fraudulent.

I consider that I have applied the law scrupulously to the facts of this case. I am completely satisfied that there is no prospect of success of an appeal, let alone a real one, and that there is no other compelling reason why the appeal should be heard. I therefore refuse permission. Mr. Chhatbar, of course, is entitled to renew his application for permission with the Court of Appeal. Thank you very much.

 

The Judge then goes on to address the Press in relation to accuracy of reporting (lets see if this makes any difference when they report the case)

On 3 March 2014 a report appeared in the Daily Mail authored by a journalist who had been in court[2]. In the report it was stated “Financial adviser Mr Chhatbar and travel agent Miss Reheman, 19, fled after a relative made an allegation to Leicester city council social services that Mr Chhatbar had a violent past. It is a claim the couple vigorously deny, but social workers warned them to split up so Momo could live with Miss Reheman in safety or else they would seize the baby.” The report failed to mention what I had said in the first two sentences of para 17 concerning the father’s conviction for an offence of domestic violence. Further, to the best of my recollection, what was written was not mentioned in court. The President, Sir James Munby, has recently emphasised in Re P (A Child) [2013] EWHC 4048 (Fam) at paras 26 and 27[3] that while the court will not exercise any kind of editorial control over the manner in which the media reports information which it is entitled to publish there is nonetheless, for obvious reasons, a premium on accurate press reporting of proceedings such as these.

 

[For the avoidance of doubt, this judgment, at which representatives of the Mail were present, WAS BEFORE that article was published, and the author of the article was in Court]

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X-box mother – the judgment

Posted on February 18, 2014 by suesspiciousminds

 

You may have read about the children who in private law proceedings were taken away from their mother and placed with their father, the headline being that she was found to be too permissive, had spent too much time in bed and the children had spent too much time playing on their X-box. It was on Radio 5 this morning, in quite a balanced way, and in the Telegraph yesterday, here.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/10643643/Mother-loses-custody-battle-over-permissive-parenting-style.html

You will see from that account that the children were removed from the mother because of her ‘permissive attitude towards parenting’ and because she was letting the children spend too much time playing on their X-boxes. To be fair to the Telegraph reporting, it  does quote quite a lot from the judgment AND bothers to ask a family lawyer to provide some context as to the circumstances in which the Courts change residence, so it isn’t actually a bad report of the case.  It  at least makes an effort to get some of the facts and to understand the principles. Not something that’s always true of press reports on family cases. cough.

 

But, if you believe that these children were taken away from mother and placed with father because she was a bit slack with discipline and let the children play on their X-boxes too much, well in the words of Ben Goldacre “I’m afraid you’ll find its a bit more complicated than that”

In these days of transparency, we can see the judgment itself, here

RS v SS 2013  http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Fam/2013/B33.html

And again, to be fair to the press reports, there is mention in there of X-Boxes, but rather more in the context of the mother appearing to be depressed, of withdrawing from the care of the children and the children being left to their own devices (pardon the pun).   One of the things that you pick up is that even from the Judge’s conclusions and findings that are set out below, there’s far more content than could comfortably fit into a newspaper article, and it is not a great surprise that one or two elements of the raft of issues were the ones that were highlighted.  For reasons of space, and pace, and hooks and drama, newspaper reports of family Court decisions tend to be flattened out and compressed and you can form a different impression than when you read the whole case.  That’s not necessarily the fault of the reporters – even a short judgment is dense, packed with concepts and long. It is something that we are going to encounter more and more as more judgments get published, but at least now readers can actually turn to see for themselves what the Judge actually did. [The X-box paragraph is 107]

FINDINGS IN RELATION TO THE PARENTS

    1. As must be clear from some of the findings that I have rehearsed along the way in this judgment, I found the father to be an honest witness, and, where the parents’ evidence differed, I undoubtedly preferred his evidence to that of the mother. His frustration and distress at this long-standing situation were palpable during his oral evidence. He has been tenacious to the extent of being dogged in his pursuit of a relationship with his sons. I do not criticise him for his tenacity. Many fathers would have given up by now. He has, in my view, demonstrated far better insight into the needs of his teenage and pre-teenage boys, for example, around issues of guidance and boundaries, than the mother. Their parenting styles are very different. He is much more in favour of structure, boundaries and discipline, and I can understand why the boys might baulk at that, given what I consider to have been the very permissive atmosphere in which they have lived at home. He is totally committed to his sons. He has given his proposals a great deal of thought, and I was impressed with the breadth of the proposals and their depth. I was impressed with how he said he would deal with difficulties, for example, if either of the boys ran away. His analysis of what he saw facing the boys if they stayed with their mother was insightful.

 

    1. My only minor criticism of him – and I stress that it is minor – is that he may sometimes have handled situations somewhat maladroitly or clumsily in the past, for example the knocking repeatedly at the door. But he did, I stress, take advice when the Guardian spoke to him. I recognise also that he was between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, his tenacity was alienating the boys further but, on the other hand, if he did not attend with the tenacity he did, no doubt it would have been represented to the boys by their mother that he did not care about them. I make a minor criticism that he turned up on 8th December with the whole family. My intention had been that it would just be him and his parents, so that he could have one-to-one time with his boys, but it is a minor criticism. As I have said, he has frequently been between a rock and a hard place and cannot do right whichever way he goes. The boys found it embarrassing his attending at their schools, but the court had endorsed that and, as I said, if he did not attend, he would be equally culpable in their eyes.

 

    1. So, overall, I consider that, as I have said, he has a good understanding of what these boys need and he is, in my judgment, up to the challenges that a change of residence would entail. I consider he has extensive support not only from his partner but also from the paternal extended family. I have no doubt that they will give him as much support as they can bring.

 

    1. I will turn now to my finding about the mother. I found the mother to be a very angry and wilful woman. Her hated of the father is almost pathological. In my judgment, this is likely to have its origins in the circumstances of the breakdown of their marriage: the father leaving when CD was but a few weeks’ old, and her belief that the father had already begun an affair with SB. That has been fuelled, in my judgment, by financial issues, in particular the mother’s assertion, which has not been tested in these proceedings, that the father walked away with all the funds obtained by re-mortgaging the marital home. In her oral evidence, she accused him of adultery and of fraud on her. The years have done nothing to abate this anger. I consider that the fact that the father has made a new life, when she does not appear to have really moved on, has further fired her up. She also asserts that he has years of unpaid maintenance and, again, this is simply an allegation which was not pursued in evidence. To cap it all, from her point of view, the father has now had the nerve to apply for a change of residence. So preoccupied is she with her own sense of grievance that she completely overlooks the effect of her behaviour on her children. In my judgment, she has prioritised her own needs and feelings at the expense of the needs of her children. That is not to say that she does not love her children, I have no doubt her does, although I find her love to have something of a possessive quality about it.

 

    1. A key example, a glaring example of her prioritising her own needs was the parents’ evening when her behaviour was petty, childish and petulant. She has done nothing to shield the children from the fallout, rather, the converse. She has consistently and repeatedly put them in the centre of this dispute and has used them, or their contact, as a weapon against the father. In my view, her anger is always ready to spill over into uncontrollable rage at the slightest perceived provocation. This was clearly demonstrated by the voicemails. I am quite satisfied that, contrary to her denials, there have been numerous occasions when the father has been exposed to outbursts like these. I reject her evidence that the children have not been exposed to such outbursts other than during the September 2012 phone call, which led to the child protection referral.

 

    1. In my judgment, she has either been untruthful in her evidence when she says that she has done everything to promote contact, or she is in denial about the concerns. Her evidence was characterised by denial and minimising, and she showed no insight into the harm she has caused the boys. Indeed, I found her complacent about the educational issues and that she minimised the concerns about lateness, homework and general progress. I agree with the Guardian that she has not got to the point where she can acknowledge that anything is wrong, and it is difficult to see, in those circumstances, how a change can be effected. It is sometimes referred to as the pre-contemplation stage of change.

 

    1. I consider it also to be quite likely that she may be depressed to a greater or lesser degree. I accept the evidence of AB, as related to CH, that she does spend hours under the duvet, on the phone or using her iPad, and that the children are left to their own devices. It also seems to me to be likely, from what the father and AB said, that they are spending a lot of time playing on their own on their Xboxes. I cannot imagine why AB would say such things to CH unless they were true, given his loyalty to his mother. As I said, they tie in with father’s perception of the situation. I consider, in fact, that it might have been very helpful to have had a psychological assessment of the mother. I agree entirely with the Guardian that the children have done what so frequently happens in such a dispute: to remove themselves from the conflict which is painful and distressing to them, they have firmly aligned themselves with one side, and that is always likely to be the primary carer who is providing for their day-to-day material and emotional needs, and rejected the other parent. This is their attempt at self-protection, and in that view I am at one with the Guardian.

 

    1. This is, however, in my view, a profoundly unhelpful coping mechanism from the point of view of their own emotional development. A child should not be forced to choose one parent over the other. Further, in my judgment, by all her sayings and doings, the mother has exhibited, with capital letters, her negative feelings for the father, which have been adopted wholesale by the children and particularly CD, who has not got the same pre-existing link with his father. The children have been wholly inappropriately drawn into the court proceedings. They have been allowed to read the report of BH, and their statements to BH and indeed to me make this absolutely clear. They talked to me about the meal with their father and the grandparents being a biased test and about seeing the grandparents as strengthening the father’s case. They talk in the language of court proceedings and tactics. I note that AB said to the Guardian: “He is tactically lying in court. Technically he is harassing us”. As I have said, it is quite plain that the mother has exposed to them to the details of the court proceedings. Because their information has come solely from her, they have a wholly distorted view of what is going on, and lay the blame at their father for their discomfort at having been involved in these proceedings for many months and having to be interviewed by different people. That is because, as I have said, they have been presented with a wholly distorted picture.

 

    1. The mother is a powerful personality. She presents as tough and somewhat arrogant. She seemed to me to show no regret for or insight into her behaviour in her evidence. Her expressions of regret, for example, for the voicemail messages and other incidents, referring to them as “not being an ideal situation”, I found to be half-hearted and unconvincing. I considered the regret related more to the fact that they showed her in a bad light. I agree that in her evidence she repeatedly sought to deflect the question, and at times was argumentative. At other times her evidence was self-justifying and minimising. There was not really a chink in the armour until she showed some signs of distress right at the end. Whether and how far her face to the world is a defence mechanism is hard to say. I consider another explanation for her behaviour may well also be her fear that she will lose her children, who are the central focus of her life. I note that in the father’s position statement, made in March of this year, he reports that AB said that his mother was apparently worried about losing them. I do not consider that she understands the importance of a relationship with both parents for a child’s healthy, emotional development.

 

    1. The mother has failed also, in my judgment, to meet the children’s needs in other important respects. She has, in my judgment, consistently failed to meet their educational needs and therefore risks compromising in particular AB’s educational prospects. It is likely that CD would be in the same situation as he grew older. I consider that she does have a very permissive style of parenting, and I accept the father’s evidence that she is more like a friend than a parent. I am satisfied that there is a failure to provide proper guidance and boundaries essential for the social and emotional development of these pre-adolescent and adolescent boys.

 

    1. Further, I have real concerns about her as a role model. I agree with the Guardian that she turns on anyone who challenges her or does not seem to agree with her. Examples are the Guardian herself and CH. She has effectively said that they are lying or have been lying. She was going to change AB’s school after the referral, despite his being settled at the school and it being a good school. I consider that these attitudes are picked up by the boys, especially AB. I consider that AB was reflecting the mother’s belief when he referred to CH as a liar when he saw me, and I find that their hostility to BH has been largely due to their following the example provided by the mother. I note her evidence that she did have the beginnings of a relationship with them when she first met them, but then the door was firmly closed. I find the mother allowed the boys to be profoundly disrespectful to both the father and BH when she did not take them to task for poking them both with the crutch from the cab in August of this year. On other occasions the father has reported the boys shouting abuse to him when he attended contact, and in April holding up a sign telling the father “I’ve told you a million times to fuck off. Go away you gay bastard”. This behaviour went unchecked by the mother. In fact, so far as the April incident is concerned, the mother was challenged by the father, and laughed. This lack of respect for the father and other adults is profoundly unhelpful to these boys, both now and in later life, for example, in a job situation or when they are in disagreement with anyone in authority. Further, the mother has no respect or regard for the father as a father.

 

    1. I am sad to come to the conclusion that I find on all these fronts this mother has significantly failed these boys. Their views across the board faithfully reflect hers. Their repeated complaints of being dragged through the courts by the father are a precise echo of the mother’s own words. Any decision I make has to have their welfare as my paramount concern, and I have to apply the welfare checklist set out in section 1(3) of the Children Act. I have to consider first of all, the boys’ wishes and feelings. In this regard I have been referred to some helpful case law as to how to approach children’s expressed wishes and feelings in a situation where there has been alienation. In particular I have been referred to the case of Re S [2010] EWHC 192, a decision of His Honour Judge Bellamy sitting as a Deputy High Court judge. In the headnote to the case at (2) it states:

 

“Section 1(3)(a) of the Children Act 1989 did not permit the court to pay no regard to the clearly and consistently expressed wishes and feelings of a child, but such wishes and feelings were to be assessed in the light of his age and understanding, in particular the impact of alienation upon the reliability of the child’s wishes and feelings, and some modest signs that his expressed views might not in fact reflect his true feelings were matters to be taken into account when assessing the weight to be attached to his expressed wishes and feelings.”

    1. At para.69 of the judgment, the learned judge said this:

 

“S’s wishes and feelings must be assessed in accordance with his age and understanding. It is here that the assessment becomes more difficult. I have found that S has become alienated from his father. S has said that his father is a ‘monster’ and that he ‘hates’ him. It is clear from Dr. W’s evidence that such behaviour fits within the pattern of behaviour of children who have become alienated from their non-resident parent. In his report of 18th July 2008 Dr. W was very clear. He said that

‘It is also important for both parents and for all professionals working with the child to recognise that the child’s expressed wishes and feelings are irrational and should form no part in the Court’s decision making.’

70. The law requires that the court should take account of S’s wishes and feelings. It would be wrong, therefore, for me to pay no regard at all to the views which S has so clearly and consistently expressed. The Act, UNCRC and case law all emphasise the importance of listening to and respecting the wishes of the child. As a general proposition I accept that the older the child the greater the respect that should be accorded to his or her wishes and feelings. As Butler-Sloss LJ said in re S… a case involving two children aged 13 and 11,

‘Nobody should dictate to children of this age, because one is dealing with their emotions, their lives and they are not packages to be moved around. They are people entitled to be treated with respect.’

I cannot and do not ignore S’s expressed wishes and feelings. However, in the light of Dr. W’s evidence, it would be equally inappropriate for me to proceed on the basis that those expressed wishes and feelings should necessarily be taken at face value. They need to be assessed in the light of S’s age and understanding. The impact of alienation upon the reliability of those wishes and feelings and the signs (albeit modest) that they may not in fact reflect his true feelings, are matters to be taken into account when assessing the weight to be attached to them.”

    1. That judgment was expressly approved in the more recent Court of Appeal decision of Re A [2013] EWCA (Civ) 1104. At para.68, Lord Justice McFarlane said this:

 

“The evaluation of the weight to be given to the expressed wishes and feelings of a teenage child in situations where the parent with care is intractably hostile to contact is obviously not a straightforward matter, no matter how consistently or firmly those wishes are expressed. In this context, the decision of HHJ Bellamy in Re S… provides a good illustration.”

    1. I take into account all those observations in my evaluation of the wishes and feelings of the children. I have very much at the forefront of my mind that I am dealing with two young men, aged 14 and 11 respectively. Their expressed wishes and feelings have consistently been not to see or have a relationship with their father. Indeed, as the Guardian says, their views appear to have hardened over time, and I note the penultimate report of the Guardian as to how AB referred to his father. I have to evaluate how reliable those expressed wishes and feelings are.

 

    1. It is a consistent theme throughout all the reports of BH and her predecessor from CAFCASS that the wishes and feelings expressed are a result of the mother’s negative influence and/or are derived from loyalties to the mother and from being provided with inappropriate and often misleading information about the court proceedings. For example, the boys blame their father for not being able to travel to Z last December. What they did not appreciate, as they only had their mother’s side, was the reason behind the court imposing the prohibition, namely the mother’s behaviour and her threats to remove them. The mother’s unhappiness at being, as she put it, dragged to court, has clearly been communicated to the boys, and they then express this as being the reason for their anger with the father. I have referred to the work done with the boys by the CAFCASS officer. Again, they could not appreciate that the reason for the repeated court hearings was the behaviour of their mother. They also referred to their father lying in court. Otherwise, it is a consistent theme that they could give no adequate reason why they did not want to see their father, and they would refer to historic incidents, which the father in any event denies, and which the Guardian concludes would not in any event lead them to have the apparent hatred that they have expressed of their father.

 

    1. AB sent his mother a long list of complaints about his father by an email sent at 3.22 in the morning on 16th August. He said it had been prepared some time before. I am unclear how that came about. What he said in the email to BH and to me was about the father being aggressive. In her statement, the mother said this referred to two incidents in contact going back to 2004 and 2005. AB refers to an incident in 2012 when the father allegedly dragged him on to an underground train, and he referred to lies being told to his school and Social Services. As I have said, CH told me exactly what AB said to her, leading to the social care referral. My concern is that both these boys have a distorted view of the reality. Some of the complaints they make, or AB makes in his email, such as hardly having any food and doing practically nothing at his father’s I simply do not accept. It is also a factor that these boys worry about the mother. They see the proceedings as causing her stress and, because they have been manipulated by the mother, they blame the father for this.

 

    1. In my judgment, their consistent expressed wishes and feelings are not reliable for a number of reasons. Firstly, because I accept the Guardian’s view that AB does not feel hate for his father inside. Glimpses of the real AB have been available during these proceedings at different stages. I note the evidence is that he relaxes once he has been with his father for a period of time. The wishes and feelings are not reliable for these reasons. Firstly, these boys have been manipulated by their mother and greatly influenced by her in their views of their father. Also they have aligned themselves with her in the mechanism I have described to protect themselves from the ongoing dispute. Further, they have a wholly distorted view of the reality of the situation because the information they have received has come from one source, their mother, and therefore, despite their ages, in particular the age of AB, I do not consider that their wishes and feelings are reliable. CD, who does not have the same attachment to his father, I consider is simply mirroring what his mother says about his father, and that this situation therefore is akin to the situation faced by His Honour Judge Bellamy in considering the wishes and feelings of the child in the case before him.

 

    1. I consider that if these children had emotional permission to have a relationship with their father, they would be able to do so, and that has been shown to a small degree by the fact that they have been able to have contact on these two occasions, albeit with some difficulties.

 

  1. Turning to the particular characteristics of these boys, I do not think either boy is a particularly happy boy. Of course in part that is due to the ongoing nature of these proceedings, but I consider it is due centrally to the parental conflict, where they find themselves as innocent parties in the middle. I consider that the boys are guarded. It is no coincidence that neither interacts with adults at the school. I find that they are both anxious about the mother’s reactions should they speak out of turn. I find it likely, for example, that AB said to his mother that CH upset him by talking to him in school to appease her and/or deflect her questioning, because CH’s view of it was that he seemed quite relieved to have someone to talk to.

 

You can see from that, that the initial impression you might have gained about the case – that mum was a bit lazy and let the children spend more time on their X-boxes than a middle-class parent might think was appropriate and that’s why the children were taken away from her and placed with dad – well, it was a bit more complicated than that.   [The extract above hasn’t even included the time the mother had the father arrested and detained for 18 hours because he knocked on her door]

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Reporting Restriction Order – Swansea

Posted on February 11, 2014 by suesspiciousminds

 

The decision in Swansea v XZ and Another 2014

http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Fam/2014/212.html

It is rather strange, in this week where all judgments by Circuit Judges or above relating to children are to be published online following the President’s guidance, to also see a Reporting Restriction Order case; although the order makes a great deal of sense in the particular circumstances of the case.

In this one, a mother from the Swansea area faced criminal charges relating to the murder of one child and the wounding of another. The mother pleaded guilty to the criminal charges in November 2013.  The alleged offences happened in 2006 and 2007, although the criminal charges were brought many years later.

This was touched on by the Court here

On 27th September 2011, the police finally applied for disclosure of the case papers. I note that this was already nearly three years after the finding of fact hearing before Wood J. The case came before Charles J on 1st November 2011. Even at that stage, he said that there was, as far as he could see, “no reasonable justification” for the delay in applying which appeared to be “inexcusable.”

Between 2007 and the present day, care proceedings took place on the second child and subsequent children those proceedings seem to have taken place over many years, with what seems like several different sets of proceedings,  finally ending in 2013 with the family court deciding that all of the surviving children could live with their parents.  [The precise chain of where they had all been living in the interim is not easy to follow, but it seems that it had mostly been with either both parents, or the father alone]

I should make it clear that the Mother’s care of the children that were staying with her has, since the institution of the proceedings, been, at all times, exemplary. The children very much wanted to be with their Mother and it was in their best interests to be with her provided she was mentally well and it was safe for them. By 11th March 2013, it was clear that, despite the criminal charges, her mental health had not deteriorated. I therefore directed that those children should return to live with her on 19th March.

 

The Local Authority applied in this case for a Reporting Restriction Order to prevent the mother’s name being published – in the usual course of events, there would be nothing to prevent the Press publishing the outcome of the criminal trial (which is certainly newsworthy) and naming the mother – even though that would indirectly identify the children. Hence, the Local Authority applied for the order. (It was not intended to keep the care proceedings secret, but prevent the children from being identified as being the children of a woman who killed a baby)

 

    1. The Local Authority case is that permitting the media to report the identity of the Mother will cause very significant harm to the children. First, it is said that, for reasons I cannot explain fully in this public judgment, anyone in the locality reading a media report naming her would instantly know which family it was.

 

 

    1. It is then said that there are a number of features of this case that could well result in real danger and harm to these children. In particular, it is argued that this case involves a significant number of features that have, rightly or wrongly, caused great contention of late in this country. These stem from the family background details and that very serious harm was done to two babies; and the Mother has cared for those children notwithstanding what has happened.

 

 

    1. It is said that, as a result, the family would be at high risk of being targeted within their community by threats and reprisals if they were identified. It is argued that reprisals might be both physical against them and against their homes. There would be a real risk of serious bullying at school. I am told that the effect on the children is potentially devastating.

 

 

  1. Significant evidence has been put before me as to the risk that the children will suffer significant harm
    1. The evidence that has been placed before me comes into exactly this category. It is from a very experienced social worker, Carol Jones, who is well aware of local conditions. I also have evidence from the Guardian (albeit that she has only relatively recently been appointed in this case) and from the consultant psychiatrist, Dr D.

 

 

    1. Carol Jones says that, for reasons explained in her evidence, the family are easily identifiable. She is concerned that the community may, wrongly, feel that the family has been treated differently because of their background. She tells me that something similar happened to another family in the locality where there was a conviction for child murder. She adds that, if there is no custodial sentence, that may itself fuel resentment.

 

    1. She goes on to say that, if the application for the Reporting Restriction Order fails, the Local Authority has decided that it will have to remove the family immediately to a completely new area of the country and give them new identities. This, of itself, shows how very seriously this matter is viewed. If this happens, the children will lose the stability that has been painstakingly acquired since the tragic events of 2006 and 2007. They will also lose the consistency and security of their schools that have provided them with significant stability, notwithstanding the difficulties faced by the family. They will lose friendship groups. I accept everything that Ms Jones writes.

 

    1. The Guardian, Joanne Bamford, says that she is particularly concerned about one of the children, who is well aware of what has happened. That child has found the stress of the last few months increasingly intolerable and is exhibiting signs of anger and frustration. Ms Bamford considers exposure will have a particularly devastating impact upon that child who uses Facebook and will be exposed to what is written about the family. The child may well be bullied and threatened. There is concern as to the child’s mental health and even the possibility of self-harm or even attempted suicide. I accept all this evidence as well.

 

 

  1. As noted above, the Local Authority has prepared a Safety Plan that involves immediate relocation out of the Swansea area even before the reaction of the public is tested, so serious are the concerns. In my view, the effect of all this on the children will be nothing short of devastating. In due course, they will all know that one of their siblings has died and that another sibling was seriously injured. These events happened as a result of the actions of their Mother, who they love so much. None of this was in any way their responsibility yet they are the ones who would now suffer the most. They would have to move home and school. They would lose their friends and all that is familiar to them. They would have to change their identities. Moreover, in all likelihood, they would suffer significant vilification and abuse. Once this is all clear, it becomes immediately clear why this is such an exceptional case.

 

 

This case is a good illustration that there’s a tension between public policy and interest that people who commit crimes should be identified and their crimes reported and the privacy of children who have done nothing wrong but might face serious detriment or harm if the local community linked them to the mother who committed these crimes. It is that tension, otherwise expressed as article 10 (freedom of expression) v article 8 (right to private life) that the Court had to wrestle with.

The law as it relates to this particular case

 

    1. I have already said that, very responsibly, having considered all the evidence, the media organisations represented before me accept that this is one of those very few wholly exceptional cases in which anonymity is justified not just for the children but also for the Mother (and Father) because identifying the parents will lead to identification of the children.

 

 

    1. I agree with that assessment. I am solely concerned in this regard with the effect on the children, not the effect on their Mother but the evidence points inexorably to serious harm being done to the children if their identity was to become known. The fact that the Local Authority considers, rightly in my view, that it would have to uproot them immediately from the area where the children have lived for many years, if I was to refuse to make the Reporting Restriction Order, is clear evidence of the serious damage such exposure will do.

 

 

    1. I am, however; equally clear that I must permit reporting of anything that does not lead to the identification of the children. I must therefore assess what is likely to lead to their identification and what can safely be put in the public domain without leading to their identification. I accept the submission of the Local Authority and the parents, with which the media organisations do not dissent, that, in dealing with this area, I must consider “the jigsaw effect“. In other words, I must remember that there may be an individual piece of evidence that itself may not lead to identification but that is likely to do so if combined with other pieces of information also placed in the public domain.

 

    1. It is accepted that they would be identified if their name was known. It is for this reason that it is accepted that the Mother and Father’s names must be given anonymity as well as those of the children. I also remind myself that there may be a significant number of people who know that this family lost a baby in 2006.

 

The individual issues

    1. The first issue I had been asked to consider was whether or not to permit reference to the family’s origin. I am absolutely clear that such reporting must be prevented as was agreed by the media once they had read the further papers. Having considered the statistics relating to persons from that country living in the Swansea area, I am quite satisfied that, if any reference had been made to their origin, there would have been a likelihood of exposure.

 

    1. I will therefore now turn to deal with the areas that remain in dispute.

 

 

    1. The first issue was whether or not there could be reference to their religious faith. Again I have considered the statistics in relation to this and I have come to the clear conclusion that permitting disclosure of her religious faith would also be likely to lead to identification of the children. I therefore refuse to do so.

 

    1. I consider that it also follows that the media should not be entitled to name AZ. It certainly points to a family of their origin. I have come to the conclusion that AZ should be referred to as “A” and BZ as “B”.

 

    1. Ms Gallagher perfectly properly pointed out at the end of the submissions that the draft Reporting Restrictions Order would appear to permit the media to report how the Mother came to be in this country. The other parties were surprised by this as they had assumed that this would not be possible. I was therefore additionally asked to decide on that.

 

    1. I am particularly aware of the fact that the Z family are not living in an area where there are a significant number of people who might potentially have this background. I have come to the same conclusion in relation to this aspect. In other words, I consider that permitting disclosure would run too high a risk of identification.

 

    1. Finally, there is the question of the composition of the family. I consider that very different considerations apply here although I am still concerned about naming the exact number of the children. To do so would immediately show that this is a family with a particular number of surviving children plus one deceased in 2006. I do not believe there are likely to be many families in the Swansea area in that category and certainly not where they live. It therefore follows that I consider it would be to run too high a risk to permit naming of the number of the children.

 

  1. I do not, however, see that there is any reason to prevent reporting that the parents are separated. Indeed, it would be surprising if they were not. Equally, I consider there is no reason to prevent the media saying that there is more than one surviving sibling and that they see their Mother. Further, I consider that it is appropriate to report, if the media wishes to do so, that, since the institution of care proceedings, her care of them when with her has, at all times, been exemplary.

 

[This latter bit explains the earlier suggestions about how giving much of the family’s background would easily identify them – let’s pretend for hypothesis sake that they are Martians, and have green skin and surnames like M’Hxtelkraw, and you can then see what is being hinted at, and also the talk of ‘how the family entered the country’ makes sense of the earlier suggestion that the local community might, wrongly, feel that they had been treated differently because of their background]

 

The Press were very responsible in this case – reading between the lines, this would be a very newsworthy story, particularly for the more erm… ‘traditional’ newspapers for whom the story would have pursued several agendas, but they recognised and accepted the balance between the children’s welfare and running a juicy story.

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An important unimportant judgment

Posted on February 11, 2014 by suesspiciousminds

I believe that Re A, B and C (Children) 2014 is the first judgment to be published and made available online despite not having any significance or importance in and of itself. It is not a precedent for anything, it does not raise any unusual or interesting areas of law, nobody is likely to ever cite it in a skeleton argument or a legal article. But it seems to me to be the first, so it has some degree of novelty and importance despite itself.  [I could be wrong, it might just be the first one that has flitted over my radar, but I have been keeping an eye out]

http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/Misc/2014/2.html

It is a fairly short judgment, the case moved at the Issues Resolution Hearing (the hearing that the Court has once all of the evidence is in, to see if the case can be agreed or whether a full-blown final hearing is needed) from a dispute between the LA and parents on the one hand (who were saying the children should stay at home under Supervision Orders) and the Guardian who had reservations as to whether that was safe, to agreement that Supervision Orders were the right orders to make.

It might actually be more interesting for what is NOT said – whilst the name of the LA and the Guardian are up, there is no naming of the social worker  (this may not be intentional, it might just be that in such a short judgment, the social worker’s name simply did not come up).

Cases like this, where the parents work to make changes, succeed in doing so, and there’s a good outcome for the family that means the children stay at home and have a happier life than they would have had before the proceedings started, don’t often get reported – the cases that historically get reported are the ones where there’s a big fight – such a big fight that the case is either in the High Court or gets appealed. Maybe it is a good thing to see that there are cases like this, where the hard work a family does to make changes makes a difference.

Happiness writes in white ink on a white page – Henry de Montherlant

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“What’s got two thumbs and just cost family justice a million pounds per year?”

Posted on February 6, 2014 by suesspiciousminds

My quick unscientific estimate of the cost of a transcript (I took the ones I’ve obtained in the last year and took an average, although I think my judgments are all fairly short)  £130 per case

From the CAFCASS figures on number of care proceedings issued in 2012 (april 2012-march 2013) that was 11,107

If, as a result of the President’s decision on transcripts, we obtain a transcript for each final judgment, that would cost the family justice system  £1,443,910

(yes, that’s nearly one and a half million pounds. A year.)

Now, to be fair, some of those final hearings are heard by Magistrates or District Judges, which aren’t included (at the moment) within the guidance that a transcript be obtained of each final hearing.

It is a bit tricky to work out what proportion – let’s be generous and say half. 

That still leads three quarters of a million pounds of taxpayers money.  A year. And the system isn’t getting any extra, so that’s money that has to be found from existing resources, which means £750,000 of cuts from somewhere else.

 [I don’t have the statistics on how many Court of Protection judgments there are a year, but those all have to be transcribed now too. ] 

 There’s also the harder to calculate figures  (a lawyer has to anonymise the judgment and arrange the transcription, invoices have to be drawn up and paid, everyone’s lawyer has to wrangle with the Legal Aid Agency about the costs each and every time,  the Judge has to check the judgment, someone has to arrange for the transcript to go up on Bailii, Bailii have to host probably ten thousand more family judgments a year than they are used to doing).  Oh, and of course, the basic law of economics that as demand increases about five-fold, the price is probably going to go up too.

Now, when the MoJ ran pilot schemes in five Courts, where all judgments were anonymised and published online for a year,  they calculated the administrative costs, if it were rolled out nationally to be £500,000 per year, pushing the costs back up above a million pounds.

https://www.justice.gov.uk/downloads/publications/moj/2011/family-courts-information-pilot.pdf

This pilot was hardly a glowing endorsement for rolling the scheme out nationally, as you can tell by the fact it was published in 2010 and the scheme wasn’t rolled out nationally (until the President decided to do it this year).  In fact, the conclusion was that publishing judgments online was pretty much only useful for researchers and legal commentators; and that journalists and the parties didn’t think it had much value.  One of the few positives (because the transcripts were paid for by the Court) was Local Authorities who were pleased to be getting anonymised transcripts.

The tenor of the recommendations was that the statistical analysis of overall trends was far more useful, and to keep publishing anonymised judgments limited to either cases that had a value as a precedent or where one of the parties specifically sought publication.

 If you don’t want to read the full report on the pilot, then there’s a reasonable summary here:-

 http://www.familylawweek.co.uk/site.aspx?i=ed85957

 Now, I’m not saying that transparency isn’t a good thing – I think that it is. Maybe it is a good enough thing to be paying over a million pounds a year for even in our straitened times of cuts and belt-tightening. I’d just like to see the cost-benefit analysis that shows that to do it this way is worthwhile, because the pilot study doesn’t.

[See also David Burrows excellent analysis of the fact that making the decision on an individual case to publish a judgment still requires an actual judicial balancing of article 10 and article 8

http://dbfamilylaw.wordpress.com/2014/02/01/guidance-from-the-president-of-the-family-division-on-publication-of-judgements/
 
If you think I’m a stroppy swine, you need to read a bit of David’s blog. He’s only been doing it a week and he’s already threatened two judicial reviews…. The spirit of John Osborne is lurking nearby, taking notes for a new play named “Angrier Less-Young Man”]

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“You can’t see me”

Posted on February 3, 2014 by suesspiciousminds

Withholding documents in Court proceedings from a party, and documents being shown to that party’s lawyer

 RC v CC and Another 2014

 http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/COP/2014/131.html

 This is a Court of Protection case, but has wider implications (in fact, it imports a lot of the principles established in care proceedings into Court of Protection cases)

 It does sometimes (but only very rarely) happen within court proceedings that there is a document, or something within a document that might be problematic for one of the parties to see. In those circumstances, the Court have to decide whether the reason for keeping it from that party are sufficiently strong to interfere with the usual principle that a party gets to see all of the evidence against them.

 

It is absolutely right that the test for keeping evidence secret from one party is a very very very high one. It does very little good for the perception of fairness and equality in Courts if things are kept away from a party.

This is a very rare course of events – I’ve come across it twice in nearly twenty years of practice. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the parent is entitled to see all of the evidence, and to ask for whatever documents or disclosure that they or their lawyers think is fit. It is also worth noting that even in these rare cases where a piece of evidence is determined by a Judge that the parent should NOT see it, the process itself ought to be transparent  (i.e that the parent knows that SOMETHING is being kept back, they just don’t know what it is).

 

In this case, which was an appeal heard by the President, a birth mother had been applying for contact with her daughter who had been adopted. There were circumstances that led to that being a Court of Protection case. There were three pieces of social work evidence which the Local Authority had argued ought not to be seen by the mother (though they were seen by the Judge) and the Judge ordered that they were not to be disclosed.

 

The President accepted the appeal, for reasons set out below, and sent the case back to the original judge for reconsideration. The President was able to confirm that the principles which govern non-disclosure of documents to a party in care proceedings applied equally to Court of Protection cases.

 The original Court had properly identified the tests to be followed (and they are all helpfully set out within the judgment)

 

  1. How is the jurisdiction to be exercised? I return to what Lord Mustill said in In re D (Minors) (Adoption Reports: Confidentiality) [1996] AC 593, page 615:

“Non-disclosure should be the exception and not the rule. The court should be rigorous in its examination of the risk and gravity of the feared harm to the child, and should order nondisclosure only when the case for doing so is compelling.”

  1. In Re B (Disclosure to Other Parties) [2001] 2 FLR 1017, having examined a number of both domestic and Strasbourg authorities, I concluded my judgment as follows (para 89):

“Although, as I have acknowledged, the class of cases in which it may be appropriate to restrict a litigant’s access to documents is somewhat wider than has hitherto been recognised, it remains the fact, in my judgment, that such cases will remain very much the exception and not the rule. It remains the fact that all such cases require the most anxious, rigorous and vigilant scrutiny. It is for those who seek to restrain the disclosure of papers to a litigant to make good their claim and to demonstrate with precision exactly which documents or classes of documents require to be withheld. The burden on them is a heavy one. Only if the case for non-disclosure is convincingly and compellingly demonstrated will an order be made. No such order should be made unless the situation imperatively demands it. No such order should extend any further than is necessary. The test, at the end of the day, is one of strict necessity. In most cases the needs of a fair trial will demand that there be no restrictions on disclosure. Even if a case for restrictions is made out, the restrictions must go no further than is strictly necessary.”

As I pointed out in Dunn v Durham County Council [2012] EWCA Civ 1654, [2013] 1 WLR 2305, para 46, this approach, so far as I am aware, has never been challenged and has often been followed.

  1. Dunn v Durham County Council is in fact clear authority (see paras 23, 24 and 26) that the test is, indeed, one of “strict necessity”, what is “strictly necessary”.
  1. In a case such as this the crucial factor is, as we have seen from the passage in the speech of Lord Mustill in In re D, page 615, which I have already quoted, the potential harm to the child. Lord Mustill summarised the proper approach as follows:

“the court should first consider whether disclosure of the material would involve a real possibility of significant harm to the child.

… If it would, the court should next consider whether the overall interests of the child would benefit from non-disclosure, weighing on the one hand the interest of the child in having the material properly tested, and on the other both the magnitude of the risk that harm will occur and the gravity of the harm if it does occur.

… If the court is satisfied that the interests of the child point towards non-disclosure, the next and final step is for the court to weigh that consideration, and its strength in the circumstances of the case, against the interest of the parent or other party in having an opportunity to see and respond to the material. In the latter regard the court should take into account the importance of the material to the issues in the case.”

  1. Before leaving this part of the case, there are two further points to be noted. The first is that, as I put it in Dunn v Durham County Council (para 50):

“disclosure is never a simply binary question: yes or no. There may be circumstances … where a proper evaluation and weighing of the various interests will lead to the conclusion that (i) there should be disclosure but (ii) the disclosure needs to be subject to safeguards. For example, safeguards limiting the use that may be made of the documents and, in particular, safeguards designed to ensure that the release into the public domain of intensely personal information about third parties is strictly limited and permitted only if it has first been anonymised.”

To the same effect, Maurice Kay LJ said (para 23) that:

“in some cases the balance may need to be struck by a limited or restricted order which respects a protected interest by such things as redaction, confidentiality rings, anonymity in the proceedings or other such order. Again, the limitation or restriction must satisfy the test of strict necessity.”

  1. A related point, often commented on in the authorities, is that the position initially arrived at is never set in stone and that it may be appropriate to proceed one step at a time. This is not the occasion to discuss this in any detail. I merely draw attention, as examples, to what was said by Hale LJ, as she then was, in Re X (Adoption: Confidential Procedure) [2002] EWCA Civ 828, [2002] 2 FLR 476, para 28, and, most recently, by Baroness Hale JSC in In re A (A Child) (Family Proceedings: Disclosure of Information) [2012] UKSC 60, [2012] 3 WLR 1484, para 36.
  1. Thus far, as will be appreciated, the authorities to which I have referred have mainly related to children. Do the same principles apply in cases in the Court of Protection relating to adults? To that question there can, in my judgment, be only one sensible answer: they do.

 

 

Part of the appeal was that although the original judge had drawn his attention to those authorities and the test, in the discussion passages of his judgment it appeared that he had reversed the test and begun talking of there being no strong reason why the mother needed to see the documents  (as can be seen from the above guidance, the test is the opposite – it has to be demonstrated why it is necessary that she SHOULD NOT see them)

 

  1. First, Mr Fullwood submits that Judge Cardinal misdirected himself, failing in fact to apply the law as he had summarised it. He points to the passages I have set out in paragraph 34 above where Judge Cardinal says “I do not consider that RC needs to see the social work evidence” and, again, “I do not take the view at this stage that it is necessary for the … social worker’s evidence … to be disclosed”, submitting that this is to put the point the wrong way round. The question, he submits, and I agree, is not, is it necessary for RC to see the documents? The question is whether it is necessary (in CC’s interests) that RC does not see the documents. Now particular phrases in a judgment are not to be torn out of context. The judgment must be read as a whole, giving it a fair and sensible reading, not a pedantic or nit-picking reading. Are these particular passages on which Mr Fullwood fastens, passages which taken on their own are wrong, saved by the rest of the judgment and, in particular, by Judge Cardinal’s concluding summary quoted in paragraph 25 above? I cannot be confident.
  1. Second, Mr Fullwood submits that in any event Judge Cardinal has given inadequate and unsustainable reasons to justify his conclusion. There are a number of points here. There is no differentiation between the obvious necessity to prevent the disclosure of anything that might lead to CC being identified or traced by RC and the far less obvious necessity to restrict RC’s access to other personal information about CC. It is surprising, even allowing for what Judge Cardinal says are the difficulties in redacting the material, that it is necessary that nothing in the three witness statements should be disclosed. After all, a large amount of sensitive personal information about CC was disclosed to RC in the redacted psychologist’s report. What is it about all the information that makes it necessary not to disclose it? And how does this square with the fact that Judge Cardinal thought that RC’s counsel should be able to see it? It may be that, with fuller explanation, Judge Cardinal’s decision could be sustained, but as it stands it provides inadequate justification for such a drastic restriction of what RC can see.
  1. Mr Fullwood’s third complaint is that Judge Cardinal has in effect introduced a closed material procedure, which, he says, was inappropriate in this particular case and is in any event, as a matter of general principle, inappropriate in the Court of Protection. I am not sure that it is helpful to categorise what Judge Cardinal did here as a closed material procedure as that expression is more generally understood. I take him to have been doing no more than has been hallowed by long practice in these cases and now has the weighty imprimatur of Baroness Hale. Whether, on the other hand, it was appropriate in this case is another matter. I have already alluded to the deficiencies in Judge Cardinal’s reasoning. But there is another point. As Moses LJ made clear, this is a process dependent upon counsel’s agreement – an agreement which counsel for the reasons given by Moses LJ may feel unable to give and which in any event the instructions from his lay client may prevent him giving. Judge Cardinal does not seem to have explored these aspects of the matter. Nor, for that matter, does he consider other possible solutions: allowing RC to read, but not to borrow or copy, suitably redacted copies of the documents, or directing that there be disclosure to her of a document setting out the gist of what is being said by the social workers.

Conclusion

  1. In the circumstances I am persuaded that the appeal should be allowed to the extent of setting aside those parts of Judge Cardinal’s order which relate to the three social worker statements. Counsel were agreed that in this event the matter should be returned to Judge Cardinal to reconsider his decision and judgment in the light of this judgment

 

 

The other matter of interest was that the original Court had ordered that the documents in question could be seen by mother’s legal team (presumably to reassure themselves that there was not a “smoking gun” being kept back from them) but on the basis that the documents or their contents were not to be shared with the mother.

 

That puts the lawyers in a difficult spot, and the President makes it plain that such an arrangement

 

(a)   can only happen with the agreement of the legal team and not be imposed upon them, and

(b)   they can only agree if they have instructions to do so, and

(c)   They can only agree if they are satisfied that they can do so without any damage to their client’s interests (which is, of course, bloody difficult when they don’t know what might be contained in those documents)

 

  1. It is apparent from Official Solicitor to the Supreme Court v K and Another [1965] AC 201 that disclosure limited to a party’s legal representatives was already by then a recognised practice in wardship. It is mentioned by Sir Nicholas Wall P in A County Council v SB, MA and AA [2010] EWHC 2528 (Fam) , [2011] 1 FLR 651, para 37. There can be no doubt as to the legality of the practice: see, for example, R (Mohammed) v The Secretary of State for Defence [2012] EWHC 3454 (Admin). But there are obviously potential difficulties, some identified in a characteristically thoughtful discussion in the June 2013 issue of the Thirty Nine Essex Street Court of Protection Newsletter of Judge Cardinal’s judgment in this case.
  1. Importantly, such disclosure cannot take place without the consent of the lawyers to whom the disclosure is to be made; and they may find themselves, for reasons they may be unable to communicate to the court, unable to give such consent. Moreover, they cannot consent unless satisfied that they can do so without damage to their client’s interests. As Moses LJ said in Mohammed (para 28):

“The free and unencumbered ability to give and receive instructions is an important facet of open and fair trials. That ability is hampered if in some respects the lawyer is unable to disclose all the relevant evidence and material and, in that respect, the client is deprived of the opportunity to give informed instructions. But the degree to which that is of importance will vary from case to case. No lawyers should consent to such a ring unless they are satisfied they can do so without harming their client’s case. But provided the legal advisers are satisfied they can safely continue to act under a restriction, the inability to communicate fully with the client will not in such circumstances undermine the fundamental principles on which a fair application for judicial review depends.”

 

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Transparency and Facebook

Posted on January 24, 2014 by suesspiciousminds

This is a County Court case, dealing with some of the transparency issues that I’ve been writing about recently, and highlights that there are going to be teething problems as the Courts move from very secret to fairly open. 

[If we were moving to 100% open where there were no restrictions at all, the lack of clarity about what is ‘direct identification’, what is ‘indirect identification’ and what is neither, wouldn’t be such an issue, but at the moment, given that what the Courts are prohibiting is direct or indirect identification of the child and linking that to identification that that particular child had been the subject of Court proceedings, not being clear about what is meant by those terms is no longer helpful.]

 

Re B (A Child) 2014

 

http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCC/Fam/2014/B1.html

 

 

The case involved an application by the Local Authority (Staffordshire) for a Reporting Restriction Order  – given that Staffordshire were the LA who lost so badly on this issue when they came before the President in Re J they must have been fairly nervous about making the application.

 

The child is 2 years old and on 23rd May 2013 the Family Proceedings Court made her the subject of care and placement orders.  There had been extensive assessments of the problems faced by these parents.  The mother and the father came to the courageous and wise decision that they would not oppose the local authority’s plan for their child to be placed for adoption.  The maternal grandmother had a different view and she made an application to the court for an order that she should care for the child.  The grandmother was also the subject of extensive assessment which concluded that the child should not be placed with her.

 

What happened after that final hearing was that the grandmother did not accept the outcome in the way that the parents had. She was against it, and not afraid to say so.

 

She appealed to the County Court, and lost, and appealed to the Court of Appeal and lost.

 

The grandmother is clearly very disappointed by this outcome and she has

complained that the outcome is unfair.  No one suggests that the grandmother

should be prevented from commenting on this saga or from criticising the local

authority or the court.  However, the local authority says that the grandmother

has gone beyond that.  They say that she has caused harm to the child by using

her name and her photograph.  Examples have been shown to me.  I have seen

the grandmother’s Facebook postings in the bundle at C13, C15 and C17.  There

is a further very relevant Facebook posting at the back of the local authority’s

written submissions, an entry which I am told is dated 13th December 2013 and

starts by an indication that it was posted 11 hours ago.  In addition the

grandmother has started an online petition bearing the name and photograph of

the child.  Details are in the bundle at C17.  The grandmother has contributed to

an internet radio station where there was a discussion forum to which the  

grandmother contributed the name of the child.  This is accessible from a link

which appears on page C19 of the bundle.

6.                  The local authority’s application for a reporting restriction order seeks

to prevent this identification of the child but otherwise does not seek to prevent

discussion, comment and criticism of the local authority and court processes.

So it is only anything that would directly or indirectly identify the child which would be prohibited.

 

That of course was easy in an age where the only people who could publish anything were newspapers – they would just be told “you can print the story but not the name” and would decide whether sans the name the story would have sufficient public interest to make it worth publishing. And the sanction for breaking that restriction would be fairly simple – it is easy to dish out a fine to a newspaper, who can pay the fine.

 

But we now live in a different age, one where anyone who wants to publish anything can do so. For example, this very blog that you are reading. Anybody who wants to can set up a blog and write about what they like. Or they can use their Facebook page, or Twitter, or join an internet chatroom or post comments on Mumsnet or other similar sites.

 

The considerations are different for a journalist or editor whose natural tendency is to comply with the Court’s wishes or orders, and that of an aggrieved person who is personally and fundamentally affected by the decision and has lost all faith in the Court.

 

The most natural place for most people these days, to express their views is on their Facebook page. The grandmother, of course, doesn’t have to give the surname of the child to have indirectly identified them if she writes about them on her Facebook page, because the Facebook page directly identifies HER, and her comments directly link the children to HER.

 

 

   The evidence presented to me leaves me in no doubt that the grandmother has embarked upon a campaign to undermine these rights enjoyed by the child.  The Facebook entry of 13th December 2013 attached to the written submissions can only be described as a call for others to help a search for the depicted child in her new adoptive placement.  The accompanying text and other text refer to the child as a stolen child but by that date the Court of Appeal had determined that the plan for adoption could not be challenged.  This kind of publication is very harmful at a number of levels.  It is harmful to the child in the present if the search established her whereabouts and led to disturbance and destabilisation.  It is harmful in the present even if the search does not succeed in that it exposes the prospective adopters to anxiety at a time when the child’s best interests would be served by them accepting her into their household from a standpoint of emotional stability.  It is very harmful to the child in the future in that these internet postings can remain so that when a little older and accessing the internet herself the child may encounter these destabilising messages and find her own wellbeing undermined.  Alternatively these postings might be accessed by friends of the child and form the basis of comment or even bullying.

11.              I remind myself that the courts of the land at the highest level have determined that placement for adoption is the only appropriate outcome for this child and an outcome which is inherently lawful.  In these circumstances it is clear that Article 8 and Article 10 are in conflict.  Both represent important rights.  However, as so often in these cases, a proportionate balanced reconciliation emerges.  The right to freedom of expression does not need the elements of personal identification which are so harmful.  The right to respect for family and private life does need a prohibition to be placed upon identification but does not need to prevent all comment and debate.  It is clear to me that the proportionate outcome is to allow discussion but to prevent identification

 

The Court balanced the article 8 right to private and family life for the child against the article 10 right to freedom of expression, and determined that it was right that the grandmother should be able to debate and discuss the case, including the facts of the case (and including within that scope her own view of the case, which might be at variance to the Court’s own conclusions) BUT that she should not be allowed to identify, directly or indirectly, the child.

 

 

There is one area in which I find the present case to differ from the President’s case of Re: J [2013] EWHC 2694 (Fam).  In that case the restraint of publication of photographs of a tiny baby was considered to be inappropriate.  The present case I find to be very different.  This child is significantly older and correspondingly easier to identify from photographs.  Indeed, the grandmother has used a photograph as part of her campaign to seek out the whereabouts of the prospective adoptive placement.  This is one of the most harmful aspects of the case and an element from which the child needs protection.  Carrying out the same balancing exercise as did the President I reach a different conclusion and find that the publication of photographs must be restrained alongside the publication of names.

 

 

 

I shall conclude with a note addressed to the grandmother. I am sorry that she has chosen not to attend court today. There may be points which she could raise which are relevant to my decision. I have done my best in her absence to anticipate them. However if there are other points I invite her to apply to the court. The worst thing she could do would be to act in breach of this order and only when steps are taken to enforce the order against her, to raise points which should have been raised today. The order does not prevent campaigning, discussion or debate. However as in many other cases, these must not include the use of the true names or photographs of the child as this would be harmful to her.

 

 

 

The judgment does leave me in some doubt, and sadly the precise terms of the Reporting Restriction Order are not set out to aid in interpretation, as to whether the grandmother can continue to post commentary or discussion about the case on her own Facebook page subject to NOT naming the child or including photographs, or whether doing that commentary or discussion under her own name indirectly identifies the child.

 

Likewise, if she posts an article about the case on a website, using her own name but not naming the child, is that okay? What if she puts up a photograph of the PARENTS but doesn’t name them? What if somewhere else in her Facebook page, there’s understandably a photograph of her grandchild?

 

As we get farther and farther along the transparency route, the vagueness about what would constitute indirect identification of the child in these sorts of cases becomes less and less satisfactory.

 

Lawyers need to be able to know where the boundaries are drawn to properly advise their clients how not to cross them.

 

People who are unhappy about outcomes of court proceedings need to know where the lines are that they should not cross in talking about the case

 

Newspapers and moderators of online discussion groups need to know where the lines are so that they don’t inadvertently cross them

 

Local Authorities need to know where the lines are so that they don’t end up warning or threatening legal action for things that they might wrongly think is a breach

 

Guardians need to know where the lines are so that children who are capable of understanding know what can and cannot be said about them in the press

 

And Courts need to know, so that these things can all be transparently expressed.

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Transparency Guidance

Posted on January 20, 2014 by suesspiciousminds

You probably recall that the President of the Family Division is rather keen on transparency – he’s been saying so for many many years, he’s certainly no Johnny-come-lately on the issue, and was saying so for a long time as pretty much a lone voice.

He called for views on a proposal to publish every judgment in care proceedings decided by Circuit judges or above, and all Court of Protection judgments back in October, and those views have now been considered and the plan is going ahead.

In fact, from 3rd February, the overwhelming majority of judgments in care proceedings will be published on Bailii. These will be anonymised (by the poor saps who work for local authority legal departments, with the anonymising then being approved by the judge) and will be available for anyone who wants to read them.

I think that in principle this is a good thing – as the President has said many times, in the debate between those within the family justice system who say that confidentiality and respecting the child’s privacy is the point and those outside who say “secret courts – if there’s nothing to hide, why is it secret”  – the transparency camp have clearly won.

If we are to move the debate about family justice beyond “secret court, what have you got to hide” and into proper areas of where the family justice system is getting it wrong, and where it is getting it right, and what can be done differently, then publishing judgments is an idea whose time has come.

I am absolutely in favour of transparency and the public being able to see what is being done by the State in their name. Only by doing that can we properly test the system and to recalibrate if things are taking place that don’t have public backing, that are being done wrong. Every wrong decision in family justice is a huge tragedy, but at present we have very limited ability to see whether wrong decisions are a rarity or endemic.

 

Pink Tape writes very efficiently about the issue and the guidance here

 http://pinktape.co.uk/rants/and-suddenly-it-all-becomes-clear/

There are things that I worry about – not least being that we are going to go very fast from announcing it to doing it in 2 weeks, that the previously expressed views from children don’t seem to have played much of a part, how we prevent jurors from finding those judgments and contaminating the criminal trial,  that there doesn’t seem much in the way of safeguards about privacy (the President is of the view that as long as the name doesn’t get out, privacy of the child is preserved – I am slightly more cautious about the ability of the general public, journalists and determined people on the internet to put known facts together to be able to link Mr X with a genuine name), and a lack of clarity about the boundaries.

It is the latter one which troubles me, because I really think there are now gray areas – once the judgment is a public document, how direct does one have to be in highlighting that the person in that public document is the same as this very real person here.

For example, if what is currently forbidden is the parent (or anyone else) directly or indirectly identifying that the child in  Re B (Parents who snort Polyfilla) 2014 is called “Timmy Grout” but that publishing the judgment or facts in the judgment is fine, are any of these actions going to get people in trouble?

 

1. Pam Grout, the mother of Timmy, posts a link to the judgment on facebook, and makes no comment about it.

2. People add comments under the link saying “you were robbed Pam”

3. A member of Pam’s extended family posts a link to the judgment and says “Don’t talk to me about British justice”

4.A campaigner about family justice who lives abroad, say a resident of the Vatican posts a link on their website, hosted abroad, saying “Pam Grout was betrayed by the State, read the case here and see how the Judge stitched her up”

5. People living in England post links to that website

6. Pam Grout posts a link to the website on facebook, but with no comment, or someone posts a link on her facebook wall and she ticks “Like”

7. A person on Twitter says “This judgment LINK is awful. My friend Pam Trout had an awful experience in Court”

8. A newspaper runs a story about the case, quoting the judgment. In the comments section, someone says “Pam Grout is not a bad person”

9. A prominent tweeter posts “Why is Pam Grout trending? #innocent face”

10. An MP stands up in Parliament and says “Pam Grout is the mother in the well known miscarriage of justice that the Courts call Re B (Parents who snort polyfilla) 2014

11. Every newspaper in the land reports what the MP has said.

 

12. Or how about this – one of the children is 14 and tweets “I am the brother of  Timmy Grout, the Polyfilla boy” and that goes viral?  

Are any of these actually breaches, would there be sanctions? Or are all of these things okay, and the only breach would be Pam Grout saying in terms “My son Timmy was taken off me by social services”

If you are advising Pam, how confident are you in telling her which of those twelve things are breaches and which are not?

 

It may well be that we end up having a debate about whether, once these anonymised judgments are out there, that we are playing a semantic game in saying that the child is not identified, given that they clearly become IDENTIFIABLE by what’s already a simple process of putting two or three facts together.

If you live in Bon Temps, and are one of six children, and you are all taken into care, and children in your class know that this has happened to you, but they only know the lurid details if you chose to tell them; then it isn’t that hard for anyone who wants to know more to find it.   Because a  judgment is published about six children who were taken into care in Bon Temps at about the right time and the ages and genders of the siblings match up, it isn’t rocket science for people who know a few things about you – perhaps your friends, perhaps people at school who have taken an unhealthy interest in you or who dislike you, to be able to read a judgment about you online and learn about your family life, allegations that have been made – perhaps that you still wet the bed, maybe you self-harmed, perhaps you have been confused about your sexuality,  maybe your dad has mental health problems, maybe your mum smokes crack, perhaps that your uncle molested you?

Maybe that won’t just be in your childhood – perhaps a prospective love interest will search about you, perhaps a future employer, perhaps future work colleagues.  If the link between Timmy Grout and Polyfilla boy ever gets out into the public domain, that information will be there for years to come, capable of being found by anyone who wants to know a bit more about Timmy. 

Perhaps when we are all wearing Google-Glass or whatever supersedes it in five years time, every time anyone sees Timmy Grout in the street they will be alerted to who he is and what happened to him as a child and be able to read all about it.  {Google Glass is here now, and facial recognition software that sees a face and can take you to any websites they are mentioned on is already here – this sort of thing is going to be commonplace in the near future}

It may be that we reach a point where society says that the interests of transparency mean that anonymity can’t be totally preserved, and that if children’s identities are found out and that people who are not invited by them to know about their lives can find out the most intimate details themselves then that is a price worth paying for opening up our family justice system and ensuring that there are no secrets.  Maybe we will eventually get rid of the bar on identification completely.  

There are many people who think that this will be a good thing. Me, I’m mostly interested in what Timmy has to say about it.

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Reporting restriction order

Posted on December 18, 2013 by suesspiciousminds

There is a new Reporting Restriction Order case up – Re TM 2013, decided by Holman J.  In this case, there is a blanket ban on publication of information about the case, in a very wide sense.

http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Fam/2013/4043.html

The purpose of these few words is solely to explain why I am imposing temporarily what has just been described as a blanket injunction on any reporting whatsoever – whether in a newspaper, by broadcast, or in any form of web-based communication – of the existence of these proceedings or anything that has taken place in court today. I do so because that is, of course, a very strong and grave restriction on the Convention right of freedom of expression which underpins the democratic rights of us all. These proceedings were listed for hearing in public, and every single word of them today has taken place in public, with journalists present in the court room. I am now delivering this short judgment in public, but this judgment, like everything else that has been said today, will also be the subject of the same temporary blanket restraint.

That immediately makes one reach for Roget’s Thesaurus of “Secret Court Outrage phrases”, but bear with me.

The Judge goes on to point out that the parents did not attend this hearing, and that part of the reason for the blanket ban on publication of details is that it would be truly ghastly for them if they were to read a story in the Press about what was happening to their child and learn something new from that reporting, rather than from the doctors caring for the child.

  • I have been very concerned throughout today at the complete absence from the courtroom of either parent or any representative on their behalves. It is very sad indeed that there has been this breakdown, which I hope is only temporary, between the parents and the hospital concerned, and I am extremely anxious that every possible step is taken to seek to repair the damage. There is a local authority social worker who knows the parents well, and steps are being taken, as I understand it, to see if that social worker can directly visit and engage with the parents.  
  • There is a real risk here that if I conclude today’s hearing with some final judgment and decision, that may serve only to deepen, rather than heal, the difficulties that currently arise. It is not difficult to imagine that a parent, who already feels in some state of disagreement or even conflict with a hospital, may feel all the more aggrieved if he or she learns that some legal proceedings have taken place, as it were, behind their back. It is desperately important that as soon as reasonably possible the relationship between the mother and the child herself resumes, and desperately important, if at all possible, that the advised medical treatment moves forward consensually rather than as a result of some court order from the outside.  
  • Because I am not able to be satisfied that either parent has been appropriately served, it seems to me that I have really no alternative but to adjourn this hearing. The treating doctor, Dr J C FRCS, has given extremely careful, measured, clear and sensitive evidence today. He has made clear that there is no serious risk of harm to the child if there is a delay of a few days in moving to the next stage of treatment, however much they might have wished to have done so now or even before today. So this is not a situation of such urgency that a grave risk to the child would override considerations even of justice to a parent.  
  • For those reasons, I am clear that I must adjourn this case part-heard to next Tuesday, which has been identified as the only available clear court day next week. The reason why I make the blanket injunction against the press really arises very obviously out of the facts that I have just described. I wish to make plain that I, as much as any judge, and perhaps more than many, am very committed indeed to open justice, particularly in this type of case. The press are very welcome in the court room; and, so far as I am concerned, provided the identity of a child and his or her immediate family is protected, they are normally very welcome fully to report anything and everything that is said in the courtroom. But it is obvious that in the current situation it could be little short of catastrophic – when I am not sure that either (or both) parents are even properly aware of these proceedings – if either parent were to turn on their wireless or open their newspaper this evening or tomorrow morning or over the weekend and read something there which revealed to them (however anonymised it might be) that some public proceedings had taken place in relation to their child in a courtroom. That clearly could have a devastating effect on relationships between the parents and the hospital, with a severe knock-on, damaging effect on the relationship even between the parents and their child.

As Holman J points out, he is a judge who is very keen on transparency, and having to take this step made him somewhat uncomfortable, but that given that the facts of the case would be likely to identify the child (at least to the parents) they ought not to learn of these important issues in the papers.

A difficult one, and one hopes that the parents re-engage with the process and attend the hearing which will move the case forward. Whether they agree with the treatment or not, it is going to be important for their views to be heard.

Obviously, with an RRO having been made, I would be unable to have comments that go further than the information set out in the judgment, and would prefer not to discuss the particular case at all (as we don’t know what we don’t know).

I do however, applaud the publication of the RRO and agree completely with Lucy over at Pink Tape about the importance of RRO judgments being published as soon as possible – for two reasons – they sometimes raise issues of public importance which can be discussed whilst keeping carefully within the RRO terms, and secondly that publication of them means that they are less likely to be inadvertently breached.

UPDATE – the parents did engage with the second hearing, and a judgment that gives more information is provided here  – there is still an RRO on identifying those involved, or going into more detail that is in the judgment. The RRO was served on broadcasters as well as print media. Very sad situation for everyone concerned.

http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Fam/2013/4103.html

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It’s clobbering time ! Or not, as it turns out – Italian C-section case, the President’s judgment

Posted on December 17, 2013 by suesspiciousminds

 

Thanks to Jerry for tweeting that this was up – I didn’t even know there was an application. Okay, if you have been on a desert island in December – the Sunday Telegraph ran a story about social workers arranging a c-section for an Italian mother who had had a panic attack so they could steal her baby. A few days later, the press reported that Munby LJ (now the President of the Family Division) had called the case in, and demanding that social workers answer for their dreadful actions.

 

Over the course of a few days, we got more of the official judgments published, and one could see that although there were problems here the luridness of the reporting was not perhaps bourne out by the actual facts. (There are legitimate public debates about whether the mother’s representation in these situations is forceful enough against the State’s wishes, whether there should be a higher test for judicial declarations on c-sections, whether the placement order judgment made before Re B, Re B-S et al would now survive if we re-ran the case now, whether the State ought to have a mechanism to get the country that the mother is from to seize the case, and a few other bits and pieces) – but the press driven debate of “Should social workers be able to impose a c-section to snatch a baby” is a non-starter. The answer is an emphatic, no, they shouldn’t. Which is why they don’t.

 

Anyway, the case found its way to the President, ostensibly as a return of the Reporting Restriction Order (see last blog), although it appears that part of the thinking was that the President was about to open up a can of whoop ass on social workers.

http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Fam/2013/4048.html

On 3 December 2013 a national newspaper ran a front page story under the headline ‘EXLAIN WHY YOU SNATHCHED BABY AT BIRTH’. The strapline, ‘Judge’s order to social workers behind forced caesarean’, was elaborated in the accompanying article, which stated that I had “demanded to know why the girl should not be reunited with her mother”. That was simply not so. All I had done was as I have set out above. I had directed no hearing. How could I? And I had given no directions as to the evidence that might be required at some future hearing of an application that had not yet been made. How could I? All I had done was to direct that any further application was to be heard by me. In other words, if any application was made, either in the Court of Protection or in the family court, I would hear it. That was all. Unhappily this canard has been much repeated in the media.

 

What the President does say is that the case raises important principles which are worthy of discussion, and building on his judgment in Re J, considers that transparency and being able to see the judgments and scrutinise them is a vital part of that.

 

    1. In the present case, as typically, a number of competing interests are engaged, protected by Articles 6, 8 and 10 of the Convention. Three competing interests, in particular, have to be considered here. I take them in no particular order.

 

    1. The public has an interest in knowing and discussing what has been done in this case, both in the Court of Protection and in the Chelmsford County Court. Given the circumstances of the case and the extreme gravity of the issues which here confronted the courts – whether to order an involuntary caesarean section and whether to place a child for adoption despite the protests of the mother – it is hard to imagine a case which more obviously and compellingly requires that public debate be free and unrestricted.

 

    1. The mother has an equally obvious and compelling claim to be allowed to tell her story to the world. I repeat what I have on previous occasions (see most recently Re J, para 36) about the importance in a free society of parents who feel aggrieved at their experiences of the family justice system being able to express their views publicly about what they conceive to be failings on the part of individual judges or failings in the judicial system and likewise being able to criticise local authorities and others. I repeat what I said last week (Re P [2013] EWHC 4037 (Fam), para 4):

 

“The mother wishes to complain publicly about the way in which the courts in this country have handled her and her daughter. The court should be very slow indeed before preventing a parent doing what the mother wishes to do in the present case.”

If ever there was a case in which that right should not be curtailed it is surely this case. To deny this mother in the circumstances of this case the right to speak out – and, I emphasise, to speak out, if this is her wish, using her own name and displaying her own image – would be affront not merely to the law but also, surely, to any remotely acceptable concept of human dignity and, indeed, humanity itself.

    1. P also, it should go without saying, has an equally compelling claim to privacy and anonymity.

 

  1. How then, in the final analysis, is the court to balance these competing demands?

 

The Judge defends, to an extent, some of the inaccurate and tendentious reporting

 

    1. Before parting from the case there are two points that require to be addressed with honesty and candour. Both relate to the fact that, when this story first ‘broke’ on 1 December 2013, none of the relevant information was in the public domain in this country.

 

    1. The first point is this: How can the family justice system blame the media for inaccuracy in the reporting of family cases if for whatever reason none of the relevant information has been put before the public?

 

  1. The second point is, if anything, even more important. This case must surely stand as final, stark and irrefutable demonstration of the pressing need for radical changes in the way in which both the family courts and the Court of Protection approach what for shorthand I will refer to as transparency. We simply cannot go on as hitherto. Many more judgments must be published. And, as this case so very clearly demonstrates, that applies not merely to the judgments of |High Court Judges; it applies also to the judgments of Circuit Judges.

 

It is a reasonable point. Whilst the placement order hearing had little of public import until the case broke, my view is that every Court of Protection declaration judgment ought to be published in anonymised form. Looking at the law reports, there are such few c-section cases reported since the introduction of the Mental Capacity Act, I think all of them ought to be published as a matter of routine – Mostyn J’s judgment was important and should have been published and available even before this furore. If it had been, it is likely that when the story broke, factual inaccuracies could have been put right (or heaven forbid, the journalists involved might even have tried to find the judgments)

I also happen to believe that any family court application for a Reporting Restriction Order should be published in such anonymised form as is necessary to protect the individuals privacy. We can’t have family law becoming like super-injunctions, where we don’t get told that there is something we can’t know.  (The RROs in this case were put up very promptly, which does the Court service and the judges involved a lot of credit)

 

Munby does have a word of caution for the Press, however

 

think I should repeat what I said earlier this year when addressing the Annual Conference of the Society of Editors:

 

“dare I suggest that the media should remember the great C P Scott’s famous aphorism that “Comment is free, but facts are sacred.” I recently gave a judgment that received coverage in the media. A legal commentator* suggested that readers might wish to compare and contrast what I had actually said with how it was reported: “Compare. And contrast … And weep.””

 

*Waves at Pink Tape

 

 

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