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Transparency: the strange case of the judge with no name (£)
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Paul Magrath ICLR
Sarah Phillimore St Johns’ Chambers
Julie Doughty Cardiff UniversityThere is an assumption in some parts of the media that the family courts are deliberately operating in a secretive manner in order to cover up the sinister conduct of social workers doctors and local authorities; and that is why hearings are held in private (or ‘secret’) and judgments are not released or only in heavily redacted form. The recent transparency agenda promoted by Sir James Munby President of the Family Division has done something to address this. Old habits die hard however and the idea that there is conspiracy underlying the family justice system remains the default position for some journalists. They seem reluctant to believe that missing information may have been accidentally omitted but always assume that it must have been intentionally suppressed.
An example of this pattern of events occurred in January 2015 as we set out below. The authors of this article are members of...
Read the full article here.
