Confidentiality
21. A further difficulty arose in relation with this
inquiry. As the law stands, parties to family cases are forbidden
to pass on details of their cases to those not involved in proceedings
before the court.[12]
The reason for this is to protect parties to family cases, in
particular children. There are significant disadvantages to a
blanket ban on any disclosure. It means, for example, that it
is impossible for journalists to gain access to the courts to
be able to collect information about the general running of the
system. We shall comment in our Report on Family Justice on confidentiality
in family justice cases.
22. Although the law does not apply to Parliament
in the same way as to individual citizens, for reasons of comity
it is of course desirable for parliamentary committees to respect
orders of the court. Therefore, we took a decision at the beginning
of the inquiry not to accept evidence about specific cases. Instead,
the Committee staff has prepared a statistical digest of all the
matters relating to specific cases which were brought to their
attention by members of the public writing in. The letters which
we received relating to individual cases were not treated as evidence
in a formal sense; by this means we hoped to avoid any difficulty
in respect of the interplay between the law relating to confidentiality
in family cases and parliamentary protection of witnesses. We
are glad to acknowledge that the President of the Family Division
agreed with our approach.
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