Releasing documents in children proceedings: a tangled web

• The complex procedural rules surrounding the release of documents by parties to children proceedings are at odds with the requirement under the Courts Act 2003 that rules be ‘simple and simply expressed’.
• In a recent judgment, Mr Justice Mostyn urged rule-makers to look again at the ‘Byzantine’ rules covering what parties can lawfully disclose to the police.

My brother columnist Stephen Gold in ‘Civil way’, NLJ, 16 June 2023 at p15, drew attention to the Byzantine twists demanded by procedural rules on release of documents by parties to children proceedings exposed by Mr Justice Mostyn in EBK v DLO [2023] EWHC 1074 (Fam). This subject takes an unsuspecting parent into a variety of confusing (including for Mostyn J) and confused crosscurrents of law and procedural rules. As this article concludes, the twists demanded by the rules may justify parties to a case like