Family Law

(Family Division; Hedley J; 25 July 2008)

In a case in which, highly unusually, the court had granted permission for care hearings to be heard in public, subject to a schedule of anonymisation, and which had been the subject of a documentary in which the anonymisation requirements had been scrupulously observed, the judge refused the mother's application to relax some of the anonymisation provisions. Disclosing the identity of any family member would be highly likely to lead to the identification of the child; identifying the local authority would raise a serious possibility that the child would be identified; and identifying the social worker criticised by judge in a previous judgment would create a reasonable possibility that the child would be identified. It was relevant that the child, who suffered from significant learning difficulties, lived in a rural community, and was therefore more likely to be identifiable than if he lived in a massive conurbation.

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