At a rough guess, of the 150-odd people who packed out Chancery Lane’s reading room last night to discuss the Ministry of Justice’s plans to admit journalists into family courts, 149 think it a bad idea. And the one who is in principle in favour (me) has strong reservations about the way the scheme is being implemented.
Although details are sketchy, there is little doubt that from 27 April family courts will be required to admit the press. The necessary regulations will be laid before Parliament on 6 April, a member of the audience told the meeting. Sometime over the next month the MoJ will produce guidelines to tell courts, litigants (and children) what to expect, and journalists how to behave.
Of course the political drive behind the scheme is to try and kill the perception that family courts are some kind of secret sinister feminist cabal. (‘Chance would be a fine thing,’ one panelist snorted.)
As ever in such matters, the problem is weighing the public interest of open justice against the privacy of families – which is itself in the public interest, if it protects litigants’ (and, incidentally, expert witnesses’) faith in the courts.
However, no one is proposing that newspapers be allowed to report everything they see or hear. The new regime leaves in place a raft of statutory measures banning journalists from identifying juveniles, including by ‘jigsaw identification’. Even at its most vile, the British press generally respects these measures when reporting from criminal courts and there is no reason to think this would change with family courts.
Indeed, Mr Justice Hedley told the meeting that when hearings had been opened to the press, his experience had been ‘uniformly positive’.
My personal prediction is that family courts aren’t going to be swamped with reporters. Nowadays, our cash-strapped regional papers and news agencies can’t even afford to send reporters to courts where they know there’ll be a story, let alone to those where heavy reporting restrictions apply.
That said, there are reasons for concern. The MoJ plans to open the courts to ‘accredited’ journalists. In the UK, there is no such thing. So how will courts distinguish between bona fide reporters and citizen bloggers? Another question is what to do about representatives of news media located outside the jurisdiction of English law.
As Hedley said, the real test of openness will be when the first celebrity child case hits the courts. Let’s hope everybody’s on their best behaviour.
No comments yet