TT, R (On the Application Of) v The Registrar General for England and Wales

An anonymity order may be relaxed where information about a claimant has already been deliberately placed in the public domain. The court must balance the competing rights under Articles 8 and 10, applying an intense focus to the specific rights and the proportionality of the proposed disclosure.

Children have independent privacy and family-life rights. Their best interests are a primary consideration, but they do not automatically prevail over freedom of expression where there is a tangible and objective public interest in publication. Additional disclosure may be proportionate where it adds little to information already publicly available and the child is not directly identified.

The claimant, a transgender man, gave birth to YY after obtaining a gender recognition certificate and later sought registration as YY’s father. The substantive judicial review and family proceedings were anonymised.

After the hearing, TT voluntarily participated in a documentary and newspaper article publicly identifying him as a transgender man who had given birth. The media groups applied to remove anonymity protection for TT while retaining a prohibition on directly identifying YY. The central issue was whether the additional link between TT’s public identity and his role as claimant caused sufficient further intrusion into the Article 8 rights of TT or YY to justify continuing the anonymity order.

1. Disposition. The Media Groups’ application was granted. The anonymity order was varied so that TT could be identified, while YY continued to be referred to as YY and could not be directly identified.
2. Applicable framework. Open justice was the starting point because the proceedings had been heard in public. The court had to balance Articles 8 and 10 by applying an intense focus to the comparative importance of the specific rights, the justifications for restricting each right and proportionality. The fact that related information was already public did not remove the jurisdiction to prevent further disproportionate intrusion.
3. TT. The public interest in the novel legal and human-rights issues extended to identifying the claimant where his identity was already closely connected with the publicly available documentary material. The additional privacy impact of identifying him as claimant was limited. The risk of adverse comment was relevant but the evidence showed no personal threats or unlawful conduct. If TT alone had been concerned, the injunction would have been discharged.
4. YY. YY had independent Article 8 rights and his best interests were a primary consideration. They were not, however, a trump card against Article 10. The likely immediate impact on a child of YY’s age was minimal. The additional information that he was the subject of a dispute about his parent’s legal status added little to the already public information about his conception, birth and parentage. YY’s name and direct identity remained protected.
5. Family proceedings. Administration of Justice Act 1960, s 12 did not apply because the court had sat in public. The consolidated family proceedings did not alter the substantive Article 8 and Article 10 balancing exercise.