James Bulger’s family are launching a legal challenge to stop one the toddler's killers, Jon Venables, from being protected by a life-long anonymity order.
Along with friend Robert Thompson, Venables kidnapped, tortured and murdered the two-year-old in Merseyside in 1993, when they were both 10-years-old.
James’ relatives are appealing to the President of the Family Division, Sir James Munby, to overturn an injunction that “prevents identification of the person previously known as Jon Venables”.
The case will be heard at the High Court in London.
James’ mother, Denise Fergus, said she was not involved in the proceedings because she did not want Venables to be targeted by vigilantes.
“I understand the motivation for the application, but my concern is that if Venables were known by his own name, it could lead to vigilante action and innocent people being hurt,” she said.
He was released on licence in 2001 after serving eight years in a secure children’s home and was later granted lifetime anonymity by a High Court judge.
While living under a new identity, Venables has reoffended several times by violating parole conditions, getting into drunken fights and being cautioned for class A drug possession.
He was sentenced to a further two years in prison in 2010 after he admitted to downloading and distributing indecent images of children, then jailed again for 40 months in February.
Now 31, Venables pleaded guilty to possessing more than 1,000 pictures of children as young as six and a ”sickening“ paedophile manual.
When he was arrested he told police he was plagued by ”stupid urges“ and had “let people down”.
Venables and Thompson had been playing truant from school and stealing from shops when they spotted two-year-old James at the New Strand Shopping Centre in Bootle on 12 February 1993.
The pair led him out of the area by hand and walked him across Liverpool past dozens of people, telling people who challenged them that James was their younger brother or lost.
They tortured James on a railway line near a disused station, leaving him with so many injuries that none could be ruled a fatal blow.
Venables and Thompson then left his body on the tracks to be mutilated by a passing train in a failed attempt to present his death as an accident.
They later became the youngest convicted murderers of the 20th century.
The horrific case shocked Britain and sparked national debate about the age of criminal responsibility and how to deal with child offenders.
It has sparked several rounds of subsequent legal action, including a failed claim to the European Court of Human Rights where Thompson and Venables’ lawyers claimed their trial had not been impartial.
In 1999, James’ parents applied to the same court in an attempt to be awarded rights over the length of the killers’ prison sentences, but it was not granted.
Several people have been convicted of other offences relating to the case, including attempting to identify Venables and Thompson, posing as them and stalking Ms Fergus.
Additional reporting by PA
