Family hearing abandoned over father's death threats to barrister

A family court judge has highlighted the pressure and toll on lawyers, court staff and social workers after a hearing had to be abandoned because of a father’s threats.

His Honour Judge Robinson Bem stressed the importance of publishing the judgment in AB v CD to show the negative behaviours experienced by all involved in the family law process.

The judge outlined how a previous hearing this year had been cut short on the second day after the barrister for the father in the case had raised safety concerns with the court’s head of security. These concerns were so serious that the barrister, who was not named in the ruling, had said she could no longer represent her client.

During the conference, the father had said there would be an ‘honour-based killing’ and that his ‘name will be in the papers’ for what he intended to do to the judge and to the mother’s barrister.

The barrister said her client had made a ‘series of deeply disturbing and threatening statements including that his seven-year-old daughter may come to harm'. She added: ‘These comments were made to me directly, without any provocation or misinterpretation. I no longer feel professionally or personally safe acting for him.’

The matter was reported to the Bar Standards Board. District Judge Keating, who was overseeing the hearing, immediately abandoned the case.

Reflecting on this matter, His Honour Judge Robinson Bem said the case had demonstrated the ‘unprecedented’ pressures on those working in the field of family law, whether that be court staff or judges receiving angry emails, lawyers being exposed to accusations and CAFCASS officers trying to promote and protect the interests of children.

‘All these individuals are people,’ he added. ‘They all have their own lives, and they all experience normal human emotions. Simply because they undertake a particular role in public service, it does not give them any special filter by which they become protected to such pressures.’

The court had reconvened for a three-day hearing earlier this month at which the father – by then a litigant in person – had argued in favour of continued indirect contact with his daughter.

A court finding had been made in 2023 that the father had been coercive to his wife and had threatened to kill her and her father. The father had armed himself with a knife during the incident that prompted the breakdown of the marriage.

The judge made an order that there be no contact between the father and the girl and that he be prevented from making any further application without first obtaining the permission of the court until after his daughter’s 16th birthday. He further ordered that the father pay £9,000 towards his ex-wife's costs of the abandoned hearing from earlier this year.