AM v Local Authority & Anor

Judgment

Lord Justice Wall:

Introduction

In this case, a father of three children seeks permission to appeal against care and other orders made by His Honour Judge Walsh sitting as a judge of the Family Division of the High Court in the Leeds District Registry on 23 October 2008. We heard oral argument on 20 February 2009 from leading counsel instructed on behalf of the father and on behalf of the local authority, together with submissions from junior counsel instructed on behalf of the children’s guardian. We then took the highly unusual step of reserving judgment.

Before going into the detail of the case, I would like to make a number of preliminary points. The first is that, in my judgment, this application raises issues of considerable public importance. I would, therefore, speaking for myself, propose that although judgments on permission applications are not normally reported, we should give permission for our judgments in this application to be reported by the law reporters should they wish to do so. The judgments will, of course, in any event be in the public domain, and available to the media in print and on the internet in the normal way.

Secondly, we have imposed reporting restrictions. The judge decided this case on the basis that any identification of the children concerned ran the risk of them suffering serious physical harm. In my judgment, that includes abduction and even death. The case thus demonstrates graphically the tension between the need for informed public debate about the issues raised by the case and the need for strict anonymity to protect both the father of the children and the children themselves.

This judgment will thus be written anonymously. The father will from this point on be referred to either as “the applicant” or “the father” throughout. The other participants will be identified by their roles - for example, the children’s mother will be called “the mother”, and other members of her family will be designated by reference to the relationship they bear to her. Likewise, I propose to refer to the children as, respectively, A, B and C. These are not their true initials. The experts will be identified according to the area of their expertise.

The only persons and places to be identified by name in the judgment will be the judge, the court in which he was sitting, and counsel. However, it is important to an understanding of the case to note that the parents are both Muslims and that both the paternal and the maternal