Practice

Family Division - proceedings in chambers - confidentiality - leave to disclose evidence not necessaryClibbery v Allan and Another: FD (Munby J): 14 June 2001The unmarried applicant had been unsuccessful in her application under part IV of the Family Law Act 1996 for an occupation order in respect of a flat owned by the respondent's company.

Following subsequent publication in the press of, among other things, direct quotations from the respondent's sworn written evidence in the proceedings heard in chambers in the Family Division, she had been restrained from making further disclosures by an ex parte injunction granted to the respondent by Mr Justice Connell on 3 May 2001.Andrew Moylan QC and Christopher Pocock (instructed by Kingsley Napley) for the respondent.

Andrew Monson (instructed by Reynolds Porter Chamberlain) for the applicant.Held, discharging the injunction, that no confidentiality attached to proceedings, or to information conveyed in the course of proceedings, in the Family Division merely because those proceedings took place in chambers; that, as section 12 of the Administration of Justice Act 1960 as substituted (cases involving children), section 1(1)(b) of the Judicial Proceedings (Regulation of Reports) Act 1926 (ancillary relief proceedings), the Family Proceedings Rules 1991 rules 3.9(1), 10.20(3) and 10.15(6), and the principle of the implied undertaking not to disclose to third parties information provided under compulsion, did not apply, there was nothing in domestic law that made information not already inherently confidential into confidential information simply because it was filed in the Family Division; and that, striking the necessary balance between the public and private interests involved, restriction of the applicant's rights under article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights to protect the respondent's rights under article 8 was not justified and would be an inappropriate interference with the applicant's rights.