Court of Appeal rules the 3 Sara Sharif judges can be identified next week.

Accountability..
.So many mistakes made by people that lead to tragedy, the lessons will be learnt diatribe is trotted out time after time, and sadly the lessons are not learnt.
Maybe if these people were publicly accountable for their decisions possibly they will be more careful.

Wylow3 The judges were given information that clearly showed they were making the wrong decision. They just thought they knew best.

You don’t understand Barleyfields. Family Court proceedings are never reported on, because to do so would indeed breach the privacy of the court, and therefore the children. Other courts are held in public, quite rightly, but Family Courts are not. They are completely private. You don’t seem to understand that. Are you suggesting that Family Courts become public, like other courts?

The problems in the O/P for me are simply in what we've mentioned already - that direct comparisons are made between proceedings in criminal courts and family courts as if the two are the same in nature.

They are not.

I already know their names.
Incompetent idiots.

Naming these judges won’t make a difference to future cases. No judge deliberately returns a vulnerable child to abusive parents. Mistakes happen, sometimes terrible mistakes, but parents can and do lie and it’s easy to be taken in. It shouldn’t happen but occasionally it does.
Naming these judges won’t improve anything, in fact it coukd affect anyone deciding whether or not to work in family courts.
Given what happened in Stockport last summer when people were rioting about something they thought they knew about but didn’t, it only takes a few hot heads full of hatred to go after these judges.

Maybe Family Courts ARE too secretive? I have no knowledge of them so it’s only an uninformed opinion maddyone on my part. However the Court of Appeal obviously were not happy about the lack of transparency in this case so made a ruling reflecting their decision. They will know all about Family Courts yet overturned the ruling. They must have had reasons.

love0c

Wylow3 The judges were given information that clearly showed they were making the wrong decision. They just thought they knew best.

Family Court judges can only make a judgment based on the information that has been given to them.
I believe Shariff lied when presenting his case. He was/is a domineering and controlling man who abused all his female partners and their children, but he presented himself as the better parent to look after his daughter. We don’t know what other evidence was presented to these judges to inform their judgement. They came to the conclusion that Sara would be better off with her father, and we have never been told why they formed that conclusion. Clearly it was the wrong conclusion, but without knowing what the three judges were told, we cannot know why they made their decision.

Perhaps we would do well to remember who killed little Sara. It wasn’t the judges, it was Shariff.

maddyone, I fully understand that family court proceedings are heard in private and are not reported, and the very good reason why that is so. I had thought I had made that entirely clear. Some other cases, particularly involving issues of national security, are also heard in private and not reported or only partially reported in the press. I have not suggested that the family courts be opened to all, nor that their proceedings should be reported. I don’t know how you have got that idea. What I have said, very clearly, is that judges should be named, and the Court of Appeal has confirmed that they have no right to anonymity. That anonymity was applied for in this case says a lot I think.

I’m completely conflicted! Some of the “secrecy” in family courts isn’t healthy, but then again neither is exposing the judges to potential revenge

Blaming the judges has been compared, by another judge, as like blaming the lookouts on the Titanic for its sinking. This is monstrous. The judge is like the captain or officer of the watch. Their decisions are so fundamentally at the heart of what went wrong. The lookouts were the social workers and mother telling the captain there was trouble ahead. That the judge ignored their evidence was fundamental.

The Court of Appeal are only acting in retrospect though FGT. I don’t think you would think that court proceedings regarding children should be held in public normally.
Family Courts must be private. To open up a Family Court case after such a terrible event as the murder of that lovely little girl is completely different than Family Courts being routinely open.
And I reiterate, the judges didn’t kill Sara, her father did.

Sharif may have killed Sara, but the lack of care/responsibility/ support for her from all support services was terrible, if people had responded appropriately Sara could have been removed from that awful situation.
These people bear responsibility to.

Frontline staff are on a fraction of the salary of Judges and lawyers are under far more pressure than these privileged legal individuals and face severe scrutiny and consequences on a daily basis - so why not judges as well as the lawyers involved?

maddyone, I have not said that family court proceedings should be held in public and nor has anyone else. I don’t know why you think that has been suggested, because it hasn’t. The only thing which has been reviewed is the application by the judges in the Sharif case to not be named. The Court of Appeal has overruled the decision which allowed anonymity.

If those judges had not directed that the poor child be returned to her father there is every reason to believe she would still be alive.

They may not have killed her, but they were instrumental in her killing. Why should they be allowed to hide?

In the days of capital punishment, was a judge sentencing someone to death allowed anonymity? No.

What troubles me maddyone about Family Courts is that judges can be manipulated because a clever bugger like Sharif bamboozles them. Too much is at stake surely with the well being, emotionally and physically, of ALL children for this ‘hearsay’ from parents presenting a ‘spin’ on things for such judgements to be made this way?

Barleyfields

In the days of capital punishment, was a judge sentencing someone to death allowed anonymity? No.

Nor in Court cases concerning the IRA terrorists either. I should imagine those days were pretty frightening for all concerned.

They should be bright enough to see through the bamboozling.

Judges and lawyers are usually one and the same. Most judges are either barristers or solicitors and are still practicing their particular field of law alongside sitting as a judge for so many days a year. The minimum number of days a judge can sit is thirty days a year. All judges have been lawyers previously even if they no longer practice law as a lawyer.

And judges were happy to name Metropolitan Police officer Martyn Blake who pleaded not guilty to murdering Chris Kaba and was found not guilty, but they don’t want to be named themselves.

Double standards?

FriedGreenTomatoes2

What troubles me maddyone about Family Courts is that judges can be manipulated because a clever bugger like Sharif bamboozles them. Too much is at stake surely with the well being, emotionally and physically, of ALL children for this ‘hearsay’ from parents presenting a ‘spin’ on things for such judgements to be made this way?

I agree with you on this FGT.
A manipulative person could well present himself/herself as being something they are not, as clearly Shariff did. I assume that judges try to see their way through this, but it really must be a very difficult task. The evidence presented by Social Workers and police will have helped to form the judgment, and obviously that evidence favoured Shariff. Sara had already been taken by Social Services from the care of her mother because she was thought to be an unfit parent.
It was a complex and difficult case.

The Chris Kaba case was dreadful, from start to finish.
But it was not heard in the Family Court.
I feel for that policeman.

True maddyone.

FriedGreenTomatoes2

What troubles me maddyone about Family Courts is that judges can be manipulated because a clever bugger like Sharif bamboozles them. Too much is at stake surely with the well being, emotionally and physically, of ALL children for this ‘hearsay’ from parents presenting a ‘spin’ on things for such judgements to be made this way?

This is true, how does naming 3 judges help with it? Should all judges in family Courts be named in your opinion? How will it help?