On Monday, 9 December, Mr Justice Williams, sitting in the High Court (Family Division), granted several media organisations permission to publish information from historic family justice proceedings concerning Sara Sharif and her family, as well as ordering disclosure of a large volume of materials from those same proceedings. Sara’s father and stepmother, Urfan Sharif and Beinash Batool, have been given life sentences after being found guilty of murdering Sara.
Williams J had ordered the disclosure of other documents from the historic proceedings in March 2024. Information from those documents had, until the December hearing, been prevented from being published.
Samuel Rowe acted throughout the proceedings before Williams J. He initially acted on behalf of the BBC, instructed by their in-house legal team, and latterly acted for the BBC, Associated Newspapers Limited, Times Media Limited, Guardian News and Media Limited, Telegraph Media Group Holdings Limited, News Group Newspapers Limited, Independent Television News Limited and Reach plc after those media organisations were joined as applicants, instructed by Reynolds Porter Chamberlain LLP.
A full written judgment on the matter of publication is anticipated in the early New Year, at which time a case report will be published on the 5RB website. The earlier judgment concerning disclosure, which was handed down in the summer, is also expected to be published in an anonymised form in the New Year.