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	Baroness Brenda Hale urges judges to write judgments where &lsquo;child leaps from the page&rsquo;</p>
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	&nbsp;If a child wants to give evidence in a family law case, judges should not be so reluctant to let them, Baroness Brenda Hale told an international congress on family law and children&rsquo;s rights in Dublin on Monday.</p>
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	The deputy president of the supreme court in Britain, said children are people and have their own personalities and wishes and could give evidence.</p>
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	In the UK, in criminal cases, evidence is routinely taken from 1,000s of children every year, sometimes as young as three or four, she said.</p>
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	&ldquo;So if they can do it in the criminal courts, why can&rsquo;t they do it in the family courts?&rdquo; she asked.</p>
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	She said, of course, if a child was to give evidence, it would have to be done in a way that &ldquo;gets the best out of the child not the worst out of the child&rdquo;.</p>
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	&ldquo;Lawyers are sometimes wanting to get the worst out of the witness, aren&rsquo;t they?&rdquo; she asked. &ldquo;Some people would say that&rsquo;s what lawyers are for.&rdquo;</p>
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	Baroness Hale was speaking at the World Congress of Family Law and Children&rsquo;s Rights on the theme of &lsquo;Are children human beings?&rsquo;</p>
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	The congress, in Ireland for the first time, features 150 speakers and more than 600 Irish and international delegates across four days.</p>
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	Baroness Hale told delegates at the Convention Centre in Dublin, that she had two &ldquo;bees in her bonnet&rdquo; about the continued failure to see children as human beings.</p>
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	The first was legislation and reports that referred to children as &ldquo;it&rdquo;, which constituted &ldquo;abuse of childhood in the English-speaking world&rdquo;.</p>
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	The second issue was judgments referring to children as &ldquo;soulless initials&rdquo;, such as &ldquo;T&rdquo;, in the interests of anonymity. She said when she writes judgments she refers to children using imaginary names with the same initial as their own.</p>
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	&ldquo;I would like to campaign for all the judges in the room to adopt a similar practice,&rdquo; she said, to a round of applause.</p>
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	&ldquo;Try and make it a plausible name, right gender, right ethnicity, but not their own, then the child really leaps out of the page in a way that they don&rsquo;t if they are just an initial.&rdquo;</p>
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	&lsquo;Real human beings&rsquo;</p>
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	She also said when judges are talking to children in private, for family court cases, it is a good thing if they can see children as &ldquo;real human beings&rdquo;.</p>
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	&ldquo;There was confusion about whether this was basically a public relations exercise, so that the child could meet the judge and realise the judge was a real human being,&rdquo; she said.</p>
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	&ldquo;And the judge could explain what was going on and possibly explain to the child, &lsquo;well you have to do as I say, just as your parents have to do as I say&rsquo;. All of that is completely unobjectionable. Though you definitely need witnesses in the sense you mustn&rsquo;t do it by yourself &ndash; you need someone there taking a note and ensuring you are not doing anything wrong.&rdquo;</p>
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	Revealing her admiration for author Ian McEwan&rsquo;s book Children Act, Baroness Hale urged delegates to read the work of fiction. She said the book dealt with the dilemma facing courts and other decision makers, when a competent child refuses treatment necessary to keep him or her alive or prevent a serious deterioration in health.</p>
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	&ldquo;I hope you&rsquo;ve read that book, whether you are a fan of Ian McEwan or not. It is a very good book, or at least quite a good illustration of what a family division judge&rsquo;s life is like,&rdquo; she said.</p>
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	&ldquo;The only thing about it is, she does get all the best cases, whereas most of us mainly don&rsquo;t have all the best cases, they just pop up from time to time.&rdquo;</p>
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	&nbsp;</p>
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	(Published by the Irish Times on the 5th June 2017)</p>
<p>
	<a href="http://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/court-chief-criticises-judgments-noting-children-as-soulless-initials-1.3108429">http://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/court-chief-criticises-judgments-noting-children-as-soulless-initials-1.3108429</a></p>
