Courts and Tribunals Observers’ Network

On Sunday (20 July 2025) Celia Kitzinger, the co-director of the Open Justice Court of Protection Project, published a blog about failures of open justice in relation to a committal application in the Court of Protection. Not only were these failings a cost to the principle of open justice but, Celia reports, may also have had “a concrete practical cost to the administration of justice”:

Since October 2024, I have been asking the Court of Protection (via the Bristol hub) for information about what happened at a committal hearing before DJ Taylor sitting in Truro at 2pm on Friday 25^th October 2024 […]

The hearing was listed as public, but when I asked to observe it, I was not sent a link.  Instead, I was told it had been vacated. This seems not to have been true – and I was subsequently promised (but, despite multiple reminders, have never been sent) a transcript of the hearing. 

Today I learnt what happened at the hearing from which I was excluded. I discovered that the case heard by DJ Taylor in October 2024 subsequently went on to be heard a couple of months later by a different judge (HHJ Paul Mitchell), and he published a judgment (Committal for contempt of court: Council v Orange and others), one paragraph of which (§14) reports on the 25^th October hearing.

I now know that at the October committal hearing (the one I was told had been vacated), the judge (DJ Taylor) handed down a suspended prison sentence of 7 days and also that he attached a “Power of Arrest” order to the injunction he’d previously made (and the defendant had previously breached) forbidding the contemnor from going to the home of the protected parties.  (The alleged contemnor was not – I think – represented at that hearing. I don’t know who represented Cornwall Council at that hearing, but it may well have been Christopher Cuddihee, who represented the council at the hearing with which the judgment is concerned). 

I had to google “Power of Arrest” since I’d not come across it before.  It’s “a power attached to an order that enables the police to arrest a person whom they have reasonable cause to suspect of being in breach of the order, even though that person may not be committing a criminal act. Where a power of arrest is attached, the police do not need a warrant to arrest the person in breach of the order.”(Thomson Reuters Practical Law Glossary, “Power of arrest”).

The problem, I now know, is that DJ Taylor did not have authority to make a “Power of Arrest” order, and should not have done so.

The full blog can be accessed by following this link: Wrongful arrest and a secret prison sentence: DJ Taylor (Truro) and the failure of open justice