There is something of an anti-climax in the naming of the judges involved in the Sara Sharif case. It’s true that Judge Alison Raeside, Judge Peter Nathan and Judge Sally Williams oversaw Family Court hearings involving Sara in the years before she was murdered in 2023 by her father Urfan Sharif and stepmother Beinash Batool. But Family Court judges in England are hardly household names. The vast majority of people will never have heard of Raeside – who decided that Sara should live with her father – or Nathan and Williams. It is a fair inference that, after a few days, their names will be forgotten.
A blackout on the identities of those involved in a major scandal might make people think that someone must have something to hide
But that doesn’t mean that the Court of Appeal is wrong to intervene to allow the press to report their names, by overturning the decision of a High Court judge who had banned the media from doing so. Sir Geoffrey Vos, the second most senior judge in England and Wales, said the original judge got “carried away” and made “inappropriate and unfair remarks” about the press when they made their decision about the judges anonymity. But this is something of a side-issue.
There are other more important reasons why we should be grateful for this decision. One is, ironically, that there were actually no compelling positive reasons why anyone needed to know who the judges were. The Court of Appeal decided as it did on the basis, quite simply, that it was wrong to prevent the press reporting what it thought its readers wanted. This is healthy.
The law of privacy in the past 25 years or so has, at times, moved worryingly towards the priggish position that if information is embarrassing or distressing this is a strong argument for suppressing it in the absence of a clear public need to know. But there is more to free speech than a need to support earnest political argument. People are naturally curious about what is going on around them; the fact that their curiosity embraces matters that the great and the good might see as trivial tittle-tattle is no reason not to allow it to be satisfied. In so far as this judgment acts as a brake on the establishment’s instinct to control information, it can only be a good thing.
This case also shows that suppressing information has its own costs. A blanket blackout on the identities of those involved in a major scandal might make people think that someone must have something to hide, or that the establishment is intervening to protect its own from embarrassment. In this terrible case, if no reporting restriction order had been made, and all the facts of the case – including the names of the judges involved – had been published earlier, it seems certain that a good deal less publicity would have been generated. The matter would have been forgotten, and any anxiety on the judges’ part dissipated, a good deal earlier.
So, open justice vindicated? Up to a point. Unfortunately, we are not out of the woods yet. One difficulty which will increasingly concern us is that decisions as to how free the press is are increasingly taken out of our hands anyway. However glad we are of the result in the Sharif case, all too many press freedom cases now depend not only on the views of our politicians or judges, but on an increasingly unrepresentative European Court of Human Rights, which may want to intervene on issues involving the delicate balancing act between privacy and the needs of a free press (a view which appears often to disfavour the latter). The question of how we can prevent the removal of this vital aspect of freedom from the political process is the next big challenge facing the press and those of us who support genuine freedom of information.
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