Press Release

 

Family Court Secrecy to be challenged at Appeal Court

 

Simon Clayton, member of UK charity Families Need Fathers, will be appealing against a ruling at the ­ Royal Courts of Justice 28th February

2006.  This is set to be an important test case to both media and family policy journalists

This appeal is against a publicity injunction made by Mr Justice Hedley in July 2005 [see law report Re Z (Shared Parenting Plan: Publicity) [2005] FL 928.

 A great deal appeared in the press about Simon and his daughter in 2003 when there was an alleged abduction to Portugal and subsequent conviction. What is remarkable is that subsequently in 2005 Simon and the mother of their daughter were able to bring court battles to an end and work out a Parenting Plan (including de facto shared residence) which Hedley J approved. There were no Children Act orders made at all and the parents wanted nothing more to do with the courts. Hedley J's Judgment of 26 July 2005 was given in open court but anonymised.

One problem however remained: the Publicity Injunction continued by Hedley J, which put an extraordinary restriction not only on disclosure of information relating to the Children Act court proceedings (which would largely be covered anyway by the general contempt law) but quite generally in relation to just about any aspect of family life concerning the child. Hedley J relied upon Article 8 ECHR. The effect would be to give this child a special legal privacy right not accorded to children in general.

 The effect was also to prevent Simon publicising from his own experience the benefits of a Parenting Plan of the kind achieved in his case through direct cooperation with the mother of his daughter, and the advantages of avoiding the court processes, as well as the unhelpful involvement of third parties such as CAFCASS (the children and family court support and advisory service) amongst others. And the world, which knew about the abduction matters in 2003, has been prevented from knowing the positive outcome in 2005, so that suspicion and misapprehension about Simon will remain in his local community and more widely, which he is unable to correct for fear of breaching the injunction.

 No evidence was ever put before the Court of actual or potential harm to the child if the injunction were not made.

 Simon will be represented by media silk James Price QC. Lord Justice Wall gave Leave to Appeal in December 2005 and regarded the case as raising "a point of particular significance at the present time, when publicity and confidentiality are up for debate".

 Further background:

Sarah Harman (the sister of Department of Constitutional Affairs (DCA) Minister Harriet) was suspended from working as a solicitor for three months, back in November. Mr Justice Munby found her guilty of contempt of court. This was after she had shown papers in a family case to Harriet her sister, and minister at the DCA.

FNF members have routinely shown each other their court papers for years. Paradoxically, Munby is a strong advocate of more open family courts.

His criticism of Sarah was that she misled the court by applying to release information without admitting that she had already done so. In fact the Harman family, having been caught out, are late but welcome members of the Open the Family Courts lobby, which FNF can lay reasonable claim to having founded many years ago.

In October, Munby gave a lecture at the Jordan's Family Law Conference. He said, “The newspapers - and I mean newspapers generally, for this is a theme taken up with increasing emphasis by all sectors of the press - make uncomfortable reading for us. They suggest that confidence is already ebbing away. We ignore the media at our peril. ...We need to act. And we need to act now ... much of what goes on in the family courts is virtually invisible, a state of affairs which merely feeds the anxieties of those who are critical and which tends all too easily to the increasingly frequent complaints that the family justice system is a system of secret, and therefore unaccountable, justice ... It is all too easy to attack the system when the system itself prevents anyone correcting the misrepresentations being fed to the media.”

 
NOTE:  Ian Mackay, FNF’s media spokesman, who died 10 days ago, was Simon Clayton's McKenzie Friend and adviser up to the point when representation was obtained in the Court of Appeal.

 
Families Need Fathers (FNF) is a registered charity providing information and support on shared parenting issues arising from family breakdown, and support to divorced and separated parents, irrespective of gender or marital status. Our primary concern is the maintenance of the child's relationship with both parents. Founded in 1974, FNF helps thousands of parents every year.

 

Please see Families Need Fathers ‘programme for change’ Father’s Day Manifesto