WH19P000120 - [2025] EWHC 801 (Fam)

Open justice is a fundamental principle of our democracy. Judges hold and exercise enormous power. Open justice ensures appropriate scrutiny, accountability and understanding of their work. The privacy and confidentiality afforded to family proceedings and enshrined in primary legislation is a significant exception to that fundamental principle. In recent years, successive Presidents of the Family Division, have taken important steps towards increasing transparency in the family courts.

The drive towards greater transparency is underpinned by the right to freedom of expression, as protected by Article 10 of the European Convention. As set out by Dame Victoria Sharp PQB in Griffiths v Tickle & Ors [2021] EWCA Civ 1882, at paras 27 - 29, Article 10 encompasses a right to speak to others, including the public at large, about the events and experiences of one’s private and family life. That right is also a facet of the right to respect for private and family life. As powerfully explained by Munby J in Re Roddy [2003] EWHC 2927 (Fam), paras 35-36:

“35.

Article 8 thus protects two very different kinds of private life both the private life lived privately and kept hidden from the outside world and also the private life lived in company with other human beings and shared with the outside world. For, as the Strasbourg jurisprudence recognises, the ability to lead one's own personal life as one chooses, the ability to develop one's personality, indeed one's very psychological and moral integrity, are dependent upon being able to interact and develop relationships with other human beings and with the world at large. And central to one's psychological and moral integrity, to one's feelings of self-worth, is the knowledge of one's childhood, development and history. So amongst the rights protected by Article 8, as it seems to me, is the right, as a human being, to share with others — and, if one so chooses, with the world at large — one's own story, the story of one's childhood, development and history. Man is a sociable being. Long ago Aristotle said that “He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god”. More recently, Blackstone observed that, “Man was formed for society”. And, somewhat earlier, John Donne had memorably written that, “No man is an Island … any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind”. That is what distinguishes mankind from the brute creation. We are able to think and to communicate with each other. We have self-awareness. It is natural for us to want to talk to others about ourselves and about our lives. It is fundamental to our human condition, to our dignity as human beings, that we should be able to do so. This, after all, is why totalitarian regimes seek to silence those who will not conform not merely by taking away their right to speak in public but also by depriving them of human companionship.

36.

The personal autonomy protected by Article 8 embraces the right to decide who is to be within the “inner circle”, the right to decide whether that which is private should remain private or whether it should be shared with others. Article 8 thus embraces both the right to maintain one's privacy and, if this is what one prefers, not merely the right to waive that privacy but also the right to share what would otherwise be private with others or, indeed, with the world at large. So the right to communicate one's story to one's fellow beings is protected not merely by Article 10 but also by Article 8.”

Allied to these protected rights under Articles 10 and 8 of the Convention for an individual to impart information about his or her private and family life, without interference by a public authority, is the fundamental right of others to receive such information, again without such interference.

These are not, however, absolute rights. They are qualified to the extent that is necessary in a democratic society for certain purposes. In this context, the Article 8 rights of the child to respect for their private and family life will always be a weighty consideration in any question of publication of private and sensitive information about family proceedings of which they are the subject. In any balancing exercise, the child’s welfare is an important consideration, albeit not the primary or paramount consideration.