When I began blogging I had concerns for what I had been reading about the UK Justice System in our Family Courts. I asked the question in my Bio, ”Could this kind of thing happen in the UK?” I thought this had been tackled by Jack Straw in the last government but it seems not reading this blog. Camilla Cavendish titles one of her posts:
“Family Justice: The Secret State That Steals Our Children”
Cavendish writes:
“Two weeks ago I got a phone call from a woman I hadn’t seen for four years. She was calling to tell me that she was moving abroad, unable to bear the pain of living in the same country as the daughter she is no longer allowed to see. “I wanted to thank you,” she said, “for being the only person who ever gave me a fair hearing.” I was seized with guilt. This woman had asked for my help, and I had utterly failed her. Her story had been just so incredible. She described a world where courts need no criminal conviction to remove your child, only the word of a psychiatrist or doctor, and can deny you the chance to call any expert in your defence. A world that uses the “welfare of the child” to gag you from discussing your case. Where even if you prove yourself innocent on appeal, your children may already have been adopted: in which case you will never be allowed to contact them again. A world which had treated her so badly, this rather pretty and utterly normal young woman, that she was sincerely thanking me just for listening.” Read the full article here:
What I still find heart-wrenching when I think about the Sally Clark story - to suffer bereavement over your children’s deaths and then to face imprisonment for killing them when knowing you are innocent - you can’t help but feel moved by that story and want justice to be seen to be done.
The public outcry over the current ‘gagging orders’ by the judiciary over celebrity behaviour - or misbehaviour - has brought to light that parents are still subject to secret courts without any defence or redress. Says Stephen Glover, “There is a world of secret justice in this country, with judges handing out injunctions prohibiting the media from reporting a huge number of cases, many of which may concern much more important issues than that involving Mr Giggs.
“Some 264 orders related to children or supposedly vulnerable adults, most of which were issued in the highly secretive family courts, whose proceedings for the most part cannot be reported by the media. God alone knows the miscarriages of justices or questionable rulings that may have taken place in these courts. The public certainly doesn’t.
“It was in these family courts that judges first dreamt up super-injunctions before they spread to straightforward privacy cases. There have been some 28 of these over the past five years given to men who had extra-marital affairs, with erring footballers making up a sizeable contingent. Others include actors and a smattering of public figures.” So there is much more coming out in these gagging orders in the UK that it should worry us.
