Judges can be named

Mr Justice Williams ‘got carried away’, appeal court says

A High Court judge who granted anonymity to three judges involved in the case of the murdered schoolgirl Sara Sharif was heavily criticised by the Court of Appeal last Friday when it overturned his decision following a hearing earlier this month.

The master of the rolls Sir Geoffrey Vos, sitting with Lady Justice King and Lord Justice Warby, said this of Mr Justice Williams:

The mistake the judge made was to think that he could properly trawl through his own experiences to create a case for anonymising the judges. He should not have done so.

Courts operate on the basis of the law and the evidence, not on the basis of judicial speculation and anecdote, even if it is legitimate to take judicial notice of some matters.

In short, the judge’s judgment demonstrates, to put the matter moderately, that he got carried away.

Crucially, said the appeal court, Williams had no jurisdiction — no legal power — to ban publication of the earlier judges’ names. He seemed not to have thought of this.

Vos said:

The critical jurisdictional question is the one that, it seems to me, the judge ought to have asked himself when it came into his head to order anonymity for the historic judges at the end of the hearing on 9 December 2024.

At that point, no party had suggested that such anonymity was necessary. Moreover, no evidence of any kind had been filed supporting the making of such an order. The position at that date was, notionally at least, that the names of the historic judges had been in the public domain since the hearings over which they presided years before…

In these circumstances, once the matter occurred to the judge, he ought, in my view, to have asked himself on what legal basis he could order the anonymity of the historic judges.

Sara Sharif. Last month, her father Urfan Sharif was sentenced to a minimum of 40 years in prison for murder and her stepmother Beinash Batool received a minimum of 33 years. Her uncle Faisal Malik was sentenced to 16 years’ imprisonment for causing or allowing her death.

As I explained after the hearing earlier this month, the only possible ground for granting anonymity was to protect the three judges’ right to respect for their private and family lives under article 8 of the European convention. Courts must not act incompatibly with the human rights convention.

But, said Vos, the threshold for intervention had not been reached in this case. If Williams had been concerned, he could have contacted HMCTS, the courts and tribunals service. “HMCTS would in that event, as has happened now, have considered how the judges could be protected,” Vos said.

Previous court rulings, he continued, “demonstrate that judges are in a special position as regards open justice. The integrity of the justice system depends on the judge sitting in public, and being named even if they sit in private. The justice system cannot otherwise be fully transparent and open to appropriate scrutiny.”

The master of the rolls concluded:

There was no evidence before [Williams] on 9 December 2024 that the [three] judges had been physically threatened, and none supporting the proposition that their article 8 rights were in jeopardy. The judge had no evidence about the historic judges’ private or family life and did not need to speculate as to the generic risks that family judges might face in the modern age of social media…

In these circumstances, I take the clear view that the judge had no basis, in the absence of specific evidence affecting the historic judges, on 9 December 2024, to think that articles 2, 3 or 8 [of the human rights convention] were, or might be, engaged. He, therefore, had no need to undertake any balancing exercise between article 8 and article 10. The historic judges’ identities were in the public domain and ought to have remained in the public domain…

I would deprecate the judge’s use of anecdotal material and his own experiences to create a case for anonymising the judges.

In a lengthy analysis of Williams’s judgment last month, I described his observations on the media as “cynical”. Vos used a different term:

It was, I think, unfair of the judge to say, with such vehemence… that the journalists [Louise Tickle and Hannah Summers] had been guilty of inaccurate, unfair and irresponsible reporting.

The decision to adjourn the journalists’ application for permission to appeal just before the end of term was akin to dismissing the application. The distinction was, in the circumstances, a technical one.

The decision to adjourn necessitated the application to me for permission to appeal, which I granted on 19 December 2024. At the time that the judge adjourned the application for permission to appeal on 13 December 2024, the parties thought, as the judge had told them, that his reasons would not be available until the New Year.

It was excessive in the circumstances to accuse the journalists of irresponsible reporting even if the application for permission had been technically adjourned rather than dismissed.

[Williams’s] sarcastic remark… about the Channel 4’s Dispatches programme of 20 July 2021 was unwarranted. He said, for no reason that I could discern: “[t]hank goodness that journalists don’t have to operate as the courts do and hear both sides before delivering their verdict!”. Such sarcasm has no proper place in a court judgment.

Tickle and Summers had argued that Williams demonstrated unfairness and bias against the media in general and them in particular. But that was now academic:

It is not necessary to decide whether the judge’s inappropriate and unfair remarks about the press and the journalists amounted to actual or apparent bias. He undoubtedly behaved unfairly towards the journalists and Channel 4 — and that is enough to allow the appeals.

The judge lost sight of the importance of press scrutiny to the integrity of the justice system.

The two freelance journalists said after the hearing:

Today’s judgment by the Court of Appeal is an overwhelming endorsement for open justice and the role of the press in holding even the most powerful players in the justice system — judges — to account.

As the family courts open up further on Monday thanks to the roll-out of the successful reporting pilot, we hope that this judgment is a watershed moment in driving and cementing a real change in approach in the family court to make good on the promises of transparency.

There now need to be real efforts to work out what went wrong in this heartbreaking case where a young girl’s life was stolen from her and what might need to change. Information and scrutiny are vital tools in this endeavour.

What happens next?

Although Williams was the only person who “lost” in the Court of Appeal, judges are never required to pay the parties’ legal costs when their decisions are overturned. Chris Barnes, the barrister who acted for Tickle and Summers, worked without charge until charitable support was offered, at first by Tortoise Media and later by Law for Change.

Having decided that the three judges could be named, the Court of Appeal said the existing restrictions would remain in place for another week so that the courts service could “put measures in place to protect them from any potential harm once their names are released”.

That means it will become lawful for reporters to identify the three judges at 10am this Friday. There will be no further order or announcement and so it will be up to news organisations to decide whether to name them.

Judges 1 and 2 are now retired and had only limited involvement in the Sharif case. One made a single protective order removing the children into care on an emergency basis. The other made an interim care order ensuring that the children did not return to the care of either parent whilst risk assessments were being carried out.

If the third judge is put at risk as a result of being named, Williams may well think he was right all along and the Court of Appeal should not have overruled him. But that would be to ignore the fact that any danger to the third judge must have been increased by Williams’s decision to focus public attention on the issue.

• I shall be returning to this issue in a podcast interview planned for publication here next Monday.