Hinduja v Hinduja: Court of Protection sets path for release of family documents

The Court of Protection has set out a structured, two-stage process for releasing documents from long-running proceedings concerning the late Srichand Hinduja, allowing family members to review material for potential use in a Jersey trust dispute and a prospective probate battle, while declining to grant the wholesale release sought by one side.

In Gopichand Parmanand Hinduja (Deceased) v Vinoo Srichand Hinduja and Another [2026] EWCOP 34, Mrs Justice Bacon, sitting as a nominated judge of the Court of Protection, ruled on an application originally brought by Gopichand Hinduja and continued after his death by his son Sanjay, seeking permission to use documents disclosed in Court of Protection proceedings concerning his late uncle, Srichand Hinduja, known as SP.

The underlying proceedings, which closed following SP's death in May 2023, had examined whether SP had capacity to grant a lasting power of attorney to his daughters, Vinoo and Shanu, and involved more than twenty hearings and extensive medical, financial and witness evidence. Sanjay now wishes to deploy some of that material in ongoing Jersey proceedings concerning the Acorn Trust, where SP's capacity around 2014 is relevant to whether he genuinely disavowed a family agreement known as J14, and in probate proceedings expected once the family disputes which of two wills, dated 1992 and 2016, should govern SP's estate.

The judgement identified six categories of documents, ranging from material already lifted from anonymity restrictions but still subject to collateral use rules, to privileged documents disclosed only after a limited waiver of privilege by the Court of Protection during SP's lifetime, some of which were additionally protected by strict undertakings restricting their use to those proceedings alone.

Mrs Justice Bacon rejected Sanjay's central argument that SP's privacy interests should carry little continuing weight now that he has died. She held that confidentiality protections attaching to intensely personal material, including medical records and witness evidence, do not automatically fall away on death, and that any release still requires a case-by-case balancing exercise weighing the justification for disclosure against the ongoing confidentiality interests of those involved. She also rejected the submission that relevance to the Jersey or probate proceedings could only be assessed by the courts hearing those disputes, holding that the Court of Protection remains capable of forming its own view on relevance as part of that balancing exercise.

For documents not covered by privilege, the judge ruled that restrictions should be varied to allow the parties' lawyers to review the material for relevance, with any further application needed before the documents could actually be deployed elsewhere, a sequencing drawn from the established approach to collateral use of disclosed documents under the civil procedure rules. For the privileged categories, she found that the Court of Protection's power to waive privilege on SP's behalf ended with his death, meaning any further access now depends on his personal representatives agreeing to a further waiver, a question complicated by the fact that the identity of those representatives itself turns on which of the two contested wills is ultimately upheld.

The result leaves the parties able to begin reviewing a substantial tranche of non-privileged material immediately, while the fate of the more sensitive privileged documents remains tied to the unresolved question of who is entitled to act for SP's estate.