The Sara Sharif family court judges should have been named far sooner

There is something of an anti-climax in the naming of the judges involved in the Sara Sharif case. It’s true that Judge Alison Raeside, Judge Peter Nathan and Judge Sally Williams oversaw Family Court hearings involving Sara in the years before she was murdered in 2023 by her father Urfan Sharif and stepmother Beinash Batool. But Family Court judges in England are hardly household names. The vast majority of people will never have heard of Raeside – who decided that Sara should live with her father – or Nathan and Williams. It is a fair inference that, after a few days, their names will be forgotten.

But that doesn’t mean that the Court of Appeal is wrong to intervene to allow the press to report their names, by overturning the decision of a High Court judge who had banned the media from doing so.