United Kingdom Judiciary Speeches

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You are here: BAILII >> Databases >> United Kingdom Judiciary Speeches >> Sir Nicholas Wall, President of the Family Division:: Annual Resolution Conference [2012] UKSpeech 0E1IT (26 March 2012)
URL: http://www.bailii.org/uk/other/speeches/2012/0E1IT.html
Cite as: [2012] UKSpeech E1IT, [2012] UKSpeech 0E1IT

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Annual Resolution Conference

26 March 2012

May I begin, not only by thanking you for inviting me to give this keynote address, but also by emphasising the importance of an organisation such as Resolution both to family Law in general and to the judiciary in particular. I fully appreciate, of course and as your name suggests, that you are committed to the non-adversarial resolution of family disputes and it is an unfortunate fact, I think, that the Family Justice System has been grafted on to the adversarial common law structure, Thus, however inquisitorial we try to be, there are some issues of fact, particularly in public law, which have to be decided adversarially. The threshold criteria under section 31 of the Children Act 1989 is an obvious example, as is the fact of non-accidental injury to a child, which the parents deny. We have not found a different way of dealing with such issues, and the law relating to disclosure of documents to the police militates against frank admissions of responsibility for actions which may, in some cases, be both untypical and momentary

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