Re P
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | THE PRESIDENT |
| Judgment Date | 13 December 2013 |
| Neutral Citation | [2013] EWHC 4037 (Fam) |
| Court | Family Division |
| Date | 13 December 2013 |
| Docket Number | No. FD13P02300 |
[2013] EWHC 4037 (Fam)
IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
FAMILY DIVISION
Royal Courts of Justice
THE PRESIDENT
(In Open Court)
No. FD13P02300
This is the return day of an application which came before Mr. Justice Charles on 4 December 2013, the application being for a reporting restriction order. The circumstances underlying the proceedings are well known, the case having received massive publicity in the media not merely in this country and in Italy, but elsewhere since the story first emerged in the Sunday Telegraph on 1 December 2013.
I propose in due course, and I hope next week, to give a fuller judgment explaining the background and my reasons for making the order which will be made today.
Very briefly, my reasoning is, in all significant respects, the same as that of Mr. Justice Charles on the previous occasion. Applying the usual approach in cases of this sort and, in particular, applying the balancing exercise required by the case-law, it seems to me (as it seemed to Mr. Justice Charles) that the arguments in favour of the continuing anonymisation of the child are overwhelming and that the corresponding arguments in favour of the naming of the child, if indeed there are such arguments (and none have in fact been put forward), are exiguous and, on any basis, heavily counterbalanced by the arguments in favour of the child's anonymity being preserved. That is because fundamentally, as Mr. Justice Charles pointed out, were the child or her current carers to be identified there would be a serious risk of disturbance to the child's current placement with potentially very significant adverse consequences in both the short and long term.
On the other hand, very different considerations apply in relation to the naming or otherwise of the child's mother. The mother wishes to complain publicly about the way in which the courts in this country have handled her and her daughter. The court should be very slow indeed before preventing a parent doing what the mother wishes to do in the present case. Indeed, in the present case, following the order made by Mr. Justice Charles, the mother has in fact availed herself of that right and very extensive interviews...
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P (A Child)
...the performance of a caesarean section and, if necessary and appropriate, the use of restraint. He gave his reasons in an extempore judgment: Re AA [2012] EWHC 4378 (COP). 4 The mother's daughter, P, was born by caesarean section the next day, 24 August 2012. Essex County Council began care......