DD v EE: How press collaboration helped locate children missing across two continents

A High Court judgement handed down on 5 June 2026 has offered a rare commendation of the working relationship between the family courts and the accredited press, following a complex international child abduction case in which two young children were located after a months-long search spanning the United States, Puerto Rico, France and England.

The case, DD v EE [2026] EWHC 1359 (Fam), concerned two children aged eight and four, American citizens, who were brought to England by their mother in November 2025 in apparent defiance of orders made by the Superior Court of California. The mother, who had previously been awarded sole legal and physical custody of the children, had already moved them without authorisation from New York to Puerto Rico before departing for Europe in the company of a 24-year-old man from Lancashire she had reportedly met online.

By November 2025, the Californian court had stripped the mother of custody and awarded sole legal and physical custody to the father. A child abduction unit from the Orange County District Attorney's Office had been engaged since the previous month. Despite Tipstaff orders, disclosure orders against the Department for Work and Pensions, the Department of Education, mobile phone providers and the partner's bank, the children remained unlocated when the matter came before H Markham KC, sitting as a Deputy High Court Judge of the Family Division, in April 2026.

What followed over a fortnight of hearings was, as the judge described it, a demonstration of the "agility of the press and the court in moving between the need for a particular order and the change of circumstance." The judge made a transparency order permitting the publication of the names and photographs of both the mother and her partner, but stayed it on multiple occasions as further investigative avenues remained open. Members of the Press Association, named in the judgement with their consent as Mr Danny Halpin and Mr Callum Parke, attended each hearing, engaged constructively in the drafting of orders, and prepared press releases that were never ultimately required.

The matter was resolved when NHS England provided the mother's address, enabling local social services to carry out an immediate welfare check.

The judgement is published, unusually, at the interim stage. The judge was explicit about the reasons: to illustrate the value of open hearings, to demonstrate productive court-press collaboration, and to signal to parents who abduct children that the courts will not shrink from publicity when the welfare of missing children demands it.

The transparency framework underpinning these events has been operative across all family courts in England and Wales since August 2025, following a pilot run by the Transparency Implementation Group between 2023 and 2025 and an independent evaluation by the National Centre for Social Research. Under the scheme, accredited journalists and legal bloggers may attend family hearings and report on proceedings, subject to anonymisation requirements designed to protect the privacy of children and parties.

The judge noted that transparency orders may be amended to permit the identification of adults, including by photograph, where the risk to children from remaining hidden outweighs the harm of limited, focused publicity. Such orders are likely to remain rare, but their availability is now firmly part of the court's toolkit.

The substantive Hague Convention proceedings, under which the father seeks the summary return of the children to the United States, remain ongoing.