Lord Justice Munby recently delivered the annual Hershman Levy Lecture on the topic of Transparency and the Children Schools and Families Act 2010, in which he referred to my recent article in Family Law, republished here. You can read the lecture here on the Association of Lawyers for Children website (I’ve downloaded it here: HERSHMAN_LEVY_MEMORIAL_LECTURE_2010, as the link to the ALC website seems not to work all the time).
Tag Archives: openness
Washed up and hung out to air in public
Children Schools & Fudge Act 2010?
Further to my previous post on the passing of the Children Schools & Families Act 2010, The Times has published an article about the new provisions which is spot on: it identifies – importantly – that the new law, when it is brought into force, will in fact be more restrictive than the existing privacy rules covering children proceedings. In particular, not only will anonymity rules apply to the children themselves, but they will also apply to anyone involved in the proceedings, apart from professional witnesses.
So much for open justice. The Times says ‘a Fudge’, I’m inclined to agree.
PS Does anybody know when this is likely to be brought into force?
Open Debate
The FLBA hosted a panel discussion on ‘Publicity in Family Proceedings’ today. It was moderated by Mr Justice Coleridge, and the panel was comprised of Mrs Justice Eleanor King, Anthony Hayden QC, Joshua Rozenberg and Dr Julia Brophy. It was a really interesting discussion. There was some consensus on a number of points: that greater openness was desirable, that the first round of reforms introducing media access had been a bit of a damp squib and that the proposed reforms contained in the Children, Schools & Families Bill 2009 were an impenetrable mess.
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But it’s an enormous and complex topic to cover in an hour, and there was an aspect of this debate that I wish had been explored more thoroughly. Much of the discussion was based on the supposed dichotomy between journalists (reputable) and bloggers (boo, hiss) and the assumption that all things bad are represented by the internet bogeyman. The Bill it seems, will remove (inadvertently perhaps?) the power of the court to permit access to persons other than ‘accredited media representatives’, which theoretically at least can presently be used to permit access to the responsible blogger without the benefit of a press card. It is of course imperative that whatever the rules permit to be heard, disclosed or published, safeguards should be in place to promote responsible reporting and minimise unbalanced coverage. But, in much the same way that many held misplaced expectations that the press would be a conduit for educating the public at large about the day to day work of the family justice system (is it really a surprise that they don’t report a range of cases across the board but select only those with the power to sell papers?), there seems to be a misplaced perception that we can or should draw some bright line between the ‘journalists’ and ‘the bloggers’.
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First: Journalists and bloggers alike publish, via their different media, information for their own purposes. They none of them serve the interests of the family justice system in educating or informing the public: although their interests may coincide from time to time they are not coterminous.