Not such a brave new world in the family courts after all

Journalists are mistaken if they think they will be allowed to report full details of family cases when restrictions are lifted next week, a High Court judge said at the weekend.

Sir Andrew McFarlane, who sits in the Family Division as Mr Justice McFarlane, told the family lawyers’ association Resolution at the weekend that although journalists would be able to attend family courts, sit in on cases and cover the legal process, it would not normally be possible for them to report the detail of cases, even after they were over.

“Whilst accredited journalists can now expect to be permitted to sit in on a private court hearing relating to children,” Sir Andrew said, “they will face tough sanctions if they report any detail of the particular case that they are observing. Reporting will be limited to the process and the gist of proceedings, rather than the detail of any particular case. In other words the reporting will be about system rather than substance.”

The Times journalist Camilla Cavendish had given her readers the impression that the press would be able “to attend and freely report upon family court proceedings, and parents will be at liberty to discuss their case before a wide public audience”, the judge noted.

“This view seems to be widely shared by the media in general with the result that, from an early stage after the Lord Chancellor’s announcement, court offices have been receiving calls from journalists seeking information about any newsworthy family cases that are due for hearing after the beginning of April.”

I am relieved to discover that my own coverage was more restrained. Writing in December of Jack Straw’s decision to allow reporters to attend all family courts from next month, I pointed out that coverage “would be subject to current reporting restrictions, which currently protect the identity of children involved in proceedings”.

Sir Andrew feared that these changes would “do little to address the very real difficulty that journalists face when confronted, for the first time, after the end of the court case, with a parent who is complaining about a miscarriage of justice.” It was highly unlikely that parents like these would tip a journalist off before the case started and invite them to exercise their right to attend and observe the proceedings.

“Under the new scheme, the journalist is in no better position than they are now to evaluate the validity of the complaints that they are hearing.”

In his view, it was “not really a question of whether the family court should be opened up, but how that can be achieved whilst at the same time meeting all the conflicting and valid reasons for maintaining the essential confidentiality of the process as a whole”.

He called for “a mechanism that permits accredited journalists, MPs and others to have access to such material from past court proceedings as would enable them to audit the family justice process against the complaints that they are hearing from the parent.

This “might simply involve the receipt of an anonymised copy of the judgment” which would do no more than give journalists in writing what they had heard in court.

He concluded that the “brave new world” starting next month would be “far more sophisticated and restricted than may at first sight have been understood by some journalists, the public at large and, for that matter, the legal profession”.

Posted at March 24, 2009 04:30 PM