THE secrecy of the family courts system would be stripped away under radical reforms being drawn up by senior judges which would open hearings to the public.

Hundreds of court hearings involving disputes over money or children, which are conducted behind closed doors, would be opened to the media and public under proposals shortly to go before the House of Commons for debate.

The measures could end decades of secrecy surrounding court battles between couples which increasingly has come under fire, most recently from campaign groups such as Fathers 4 Justice. The senior judges — led by Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, the President of the High Court Family Division, and Lord Justice Thorpe, the second most senior judge — believe that the time has come for more hearings to be in public.

The family courts system is under fire over rulings on cases between parents, mostly fathers, and their contact with children — such as that brought recently by David Blunkett, the former Home Secretary — and the judges believe that open hearings would vindicate the justice of the system.

Lord Justice Thorpe told The Times: “In so far as people may be made anxious by the argument that privacy is cloaking injustice, I think it would be quite healthy to remove that privacy, (and) expose the process to public scrutiny which would reveal that it is in generally good condition.”

The judges are expected to put forward proposals this month to the Constitutional Affairs Committee.

The MPs are examining the family courts system and one issue of concern is the “culture of secrecy” surrounding the family courts and the fact that the media cannot report on family court cases unless invited to do so by the judiciary.

Lord Justice Thorpe said that he did not believe that open justice meant that “the sky would fall in” on the system.

“We are not looking into the abyss; after all in Scotland, which is part of the United Kingdom, they have always conducted their family proceedings in open court.”

Lord Justice Thorpe, who has supported greater openness in hearings for some years, said that as well as the benefit of opening the courts at a time when their decisions were under fire, a new unified family court was coming into being next year. Under this landmark reform, the differing rules and procedures of the High Court, county courts and magistrates’ courts would be rationalised.

“It is something of an anomaly that at present, in the family proceedings courts (magistrates), the press and public are admitted.

“We can’t have one court where the press can go in and another, the High Court, where they can’t. The most plausible resolution is to say the press can go into all three courts.”

But if the courts are open, then reporting restrictions are likely to remain — unless a judge agrees to lift them — because of the need to protect children’s anonymity.

Lord Justice Thorpe, who is deputy chair of the newly formed Family Justice Council, a body with non-lawyers which formulates family law policy, said that any change in policy should come directly from the council.

“It does not seem to me that we can say ‘This is the procedure that is favoured by the judges’. This is a real social policy issue. Campaigners say that the judges have a vested interest in maintaining privacy because it enables them to carry on making these ‘wicked’ decisions in private.”

There has been a gradual shift in recent years towards open court hearings. In the recent case over whether Charlotte Wyatt, a seriously ill baby, should be kept alive against medical advice but in line with the parents’ wishes, Mr Justice Hedley ruled the hearing be in open court.

And family judges such as Mr Justice Munby as well as Dame Elizabeth herself have increasingly called for more open hearings.

In a key ruling in 2002, the Court of Appeal dismissed the appeal of Ivan Allan, the millionaire racehorse owner, against a ruling that he could not have an injunction to prevent Glory Ann Clibbery, an actress, from revealing intimate details of their relationship together.

Lord Justice Thorpe, one of the judges in the case, at the time called for government action on the issue: a Government report on access to family court proceedings was issued in 1993 but shelved.

In the same case, Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss said: “The exclusion of the public from proceedings has objectively to be justified. It is not good enough for it to be said that we have always done it this way so it has to be right.”

Since that ruling, appeal court judges have increasingly held their cases in public but it has been down to their discretion. Pressure over court secrecy has also been brought to bear in a series of cases brought by Michael Pelling, then with the organisation Families Need Fathers.

He took his campaign to have his case — which was about the issue of where his son should live — held in public all the way to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, but lost.

But in a subsequent case in which he was involved he secured a ruling that reporting restrictions should not be imposed automatically and as a result judges now exercise discretion in every case.

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