Beginning January 27, 2025, journalists and legal bloggers will be permitted to report on family court cases throughout England and Wales. This new law will make transparency available in all family courts and not just those that participate in pilot programs. Journalists can request a transparency order that will allow them to attend family courts, report on what they see and hear, and access important documents, but they must keep the families in these documents anonymous.
Previously, journalists and bloggers could attend family courts but were previously limited in their reporting capabilities. Current transparency pilots are operating at slightly less than half of England and Wales’s family courts. The judges still have the power to decline requests for reporting; however, there is a presumption towards reporting. The new law will be introduced in stages. It will first be applied to care cases, which are public law cases, then divorce cases, which are private law cases, and finally magistrates’ courts.
The family courts have the most authority over private family lives. They decide important matters including which parent should have custody of children or if children should be removed from their parents. The decisions of these courts can have long-lasting effects on people’s lives, as shown in the Sara Sharif case, for which a family court placed Sara with her father and stepmother, who murdered her. The High Court Judge decided to release documents relating to Sara’s case, but the name of the judge was not to be published. Journalists have been allowed to appeal against this decision, which will be heard in early January.
The BBC News network has demonstrated over the past two years that transparency orders can be successfully used to report on significant news stories that are of public interest while maintaining the privacy of families involved. Transparency allowed BBC reporters to cover family cases in Leeds in early 2023. The drive for transparency made obtaining information in May 2023 especially simple for the BBC reporters to obtain case information for the Finley Boden case where a family magistrate returned the murdered baby to his parents. Additionally, the transparency allowed the BBC to report that a young mother in Cardiff had to pay £30,000 in the family court to defend her daughter from her former husband, a convicted paedophile. This caused MPs like Harriet Harman to change laws and make new amendments
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