The government’s commitment to maintaining the status quo in family courts is a disappointing policy reversal, says Sarah Palin
The government’s latest consultation paper on openness in the family courts, Openness in Family Courts—A New Approach (CP 10/07), published on 20 June 2007, comes out in favour of maintaining the old approach of secrecy in the family courts.
reversal
This is a disappointing reversal from the consultation paper published in July 2006, Confidence and Confidentiality: Improving Transparency and Privacy in Family Courts (CP 11/06), which proposed more openness “so that people could better understand, better scrutinise decisions and have greater confidence”.
Those proposals were twofold: a right for the media to attend hearings in family proceedings, subject to a power to exclude; and a right for the media to publish anonymised legal arguments and decisions.
The new consultation paper states that there was “little support for giving the media the automatic right to attend family courts”. Yet this is a reform which has long-standing and eminent judicial support and where a majority of responses to the consultation—including a majority of judicial responses—were in
