{"id":809500,"date":"2026-10-21T08:46:12","date_gmt":"2026-10-21T08:46:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/809500\/"},"modified":"2026-10-21T08:46:12","modified_gmt":"2026-10-21T08:46:12","slug":"jess-phillips-hopes-supreme-court-sees-sense-and-overturns-domestic-abuse-ruling-domestic-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/809500\/","title":{"rendered":"Jess Phillips hopes supreme court \u2018sees sense\u2019 and overturns domestic abuse ruling | Domestic violence"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Labour MP Jess Phillips has said she hopes the UK\u2019s highest court \u201csees sense\u201d and overturns a ruling preventing a domestic abuse survivor from suing Sussex police and the Crown Prosecution Service<\/a> (CPS) for disclosing her address to her violent ex-partner.<\/p>\n

Phillips said that if the supreme court upheld the court of appeal\u2019s decision when it hears the case on Wednesday and Thursday, it would prevent police from being held accountable for failures in cases of violence against women and girls.<\/p>\n

The address of the woman, anonymised as XGY in court proceedings, was disclosed by a CPS lawyer during a magistrates hearing in which a condition was sought preventing her former partner, who was accused of raping her and threatening to kill and throw acid on her, from entering the road where she was living. Sussex police had not marked the address as confidential when sending it to the CPS. The woman moved home as a result of the disclosure.<\/p>\n

Witnesses and lawyers in court traditionally have what is known as \u201ccore immunity\u201d. Ruling last year that XGY could not sue Sussex police and the CPS, the court of appeal said<\/a> this immunity applied beyond evidential matters and also to a broad range of police activity, including matters outside the courtroom relating to an investigation.<\/p>\n

Phillips, a former minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, said: \u201cHopefully the supreme court will see sense. I\u2019ve been part of many different cases, where both the police and the CPS, have been held accountable in civil remedy, regarding their failures.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis isn\u2019t just that I want people to be able to make financial claims against the police. Often these cases where there\u2019s been failures lead to longer-term change for victims of domestic abuse and sexual violence, like police failures within the grooming cases for example \u2013 charging women with crimes rather than helping them as victims.<\/p>\n

\u201cCriminal law in cases of domestic abuse has seen decades of failure so civil law is used to try and make the systems better and nowhere more so than in violence against women and girls.\u201d<\/p>\n

She stressed that it was for the supreme court to reach its own decision but, along with fellow MPs David Davis and Andrew Mitchell, Phillips has tabled an amendment to a bill that would counteract the effect of the court of appeal\u2019s ruling if it was not overturned, as it created \u201ca precedent that was never intended by parliament\u201d.<\/p>\n

She said if there was one agency that had improved its approach to violence against women over the past 20 years it was the police but described the court of appeal ruling as \u201cchilling\u201d, adding: \u201cI don\u2019t think it helps the police or the CPS. I don\u2019t think the idea that they can\u2019t be held accountable is something that they need at the moment or should want because there\u2019s a real problem with how victims of domestic abuse perceive the police.<\/p>\n

\u201cInquiry after inquiry, the Sarah Everard murder<\/a>, Charing Cross [the police station<\/a> where officers were filmed making racist and misogynistic comments], there are reasons why women don\u2019t have faith in the police and that\u2019s not good for the police and it\u2019s not good for change in the future. So I don\u2019t want to see a sort of really wide-ranging exemption for police to be held accountable with civil action.\u201d<\/p>\n

XGY said: \u201cMore than six years later, I\u2019m still living with the impact of what happened and the loss of the security I thought I\u2019d finally found.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve continued with this case because I believe survivors should be able to trust that the information they share to protect themselves will be kept confidential. If that trust is broken, there should be accountability.\u201d<\/p>\n

The CPS and Sussex police were approached for comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Labour MP Jess Phillips has said she hopes the UK\u2019s highest court \u201csees sense\u201d and overturns a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":809501,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-809500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=809500"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809500\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/809501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=809500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=809500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=809500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}