Still Here

Am aware of paucity of blog posts recently, owing to unusually hectic work life and poorly boy. Normal service will be resumed soon… In the meantime take a look at the draft rules due to come into force on 27th April (not yet available on OPSI) which modify privacy rules in children proceedings as set out in [...]

Open Sesame

Looking back I appear not to have posted about Jack Straw’s December announcement about the opening of the family courts, although I have since posted on the topic here and here. Although I’m sure I prepared a post on this announcement I suspect it went the way of several boxes of important ‘stuff’ during my [...]

Sting in the tail

Camilla Cavendish writes about the ‘sting in the tail’ of Jack Straw’s proposals to open up the family courts to media scrutiny. . Still no word I think about when the legislative change required to bring this new arrangement into place by 1 April is going to be published or how ‘accredited media’ will be [...]

Open Justice – Access to ‘Accredited Media’

Journalism.co.uk notes an interesting issue about who will comprise the group ‘accredited media’ for the purposes of access to the family courts. Nobody seems yet to know the answer. I’d have thought it was of critical importance in terms of safeguarding privacy appropriately.

Openness

This saves me the job of summarising the current position on the moves towards openness in the family justice system…

President’s Article

The Times is running a campaign for greater openness in the family justice system, which in many respects I support. The series of articles by Camilla Cavendish running this past week certainly make interesting reading. . In response comes Sir Mark Potter’s recent article in The Times  - it makes a lot of sense to me – [...]

Well Street

READ THIS. For anyone wanting to get a realistic idea of what happens in the family court, particularly the FPC (Magistrates) and care proceedings this article is a great starting place. It also gives a better flavour of the work of the FDAC (Family Drug & Alcohol Court) Pilot which I posted about recently. . [...]

Mills McCartney Award Announced – and Judgment published in full

Well, we all knew there would be some kind of appeal – and apparently it is by way of Heather Mills McCartney appealing the decision to make the full judgment public, due to be heard tomorrow. In the meantime here is a link to the summary of the judgment published today. . In short, Heather [...]

open justice – government proposals

The Times reports that the government has had further thoughts on the subject of open justice. After consulting and then shelving its original proposals for opening up the family court system it seems that there is a now a plan, albeit in the early stages, to pilot anonymised judgments in three areas of the country. [...]

Enforcement of Contact Orders – let it be shouted out from the roof-tops

The privacy of the family justice system makes it difficult for the public to get a good idea about what steps the courts are prepared to take in order to ensure that a child has a relationship with both parents. Those sources which are most critical of the ‘secret family justice system’ often suggest that the courts [...]