A curious, concerning and controversial news item has appeared in the Telegraph. It is entitled “Child taken from womb by social services”. Sadly it raises more questions than it answers – important questions. Who knows what the hell has actually happened? I don’t. I can’t work it out at all. Even from the opaque press release from a solicitor involved.
It has caused a lot of twittering and a lot of unsuccessful boolean searching on bailii. It has caused a spike in my traffic, in particular to my posts on Christopher Booker, and a lot of incoming traffic from some hairdressers (forum.salihughesbeauty.com/showthread.php/12572-Essex-sedation-and-cesarean-story). Curiouser and curiouser.
Twitter says all will be revealed soon. Twitter says it is probably misreporting. I’m inclined to agree – but in any event there is a deal of clarification required urgently. There is no point in speculating with such a paucity of hard information.
If someone sends me a link to any Court of Protection or Family Division judgment when it appears (as I’m sure it must) I will post it.
For the telegraph story to reach the shores of the US and be reported on CNN this morning it is imperative now that the judgement(s) are published, obviously through the Chinese Whispers the facts become distorted and wrongly reported, this matter also shows that Pres. Munby is right in wanting County Court Judgments made available for public scrutiny
Jerry, On one level there is a legitimate argument for publication. On the other, it seems probable that there are some very sensitive personal issues that it might not be in the interests of the mother and / or child to publish. Of course neither you nor I can know that, but it is at least possible that the facts of this case will not ultimately permit publication of the judgment / judgments even in anonymised form. We will have to wait and see.
One thing we do know is that the decision will not be a county court judgment. It is reported to involve Mostyn J, who is a HCJ, and in any event appears to involve issues that are likely to have been dealt with in the High Court (at least in relation to the c-section if not the removal of the baby subsequently).
I hope that there will be a factual summary issued by the High Court even if a full judgment is not possible for reasons of privacy and wellbeing.
The article says the child is now 15 months old. Surely, were this one going to be published, it would have been published long before now?
I don’t know how long it normally takes for judgments appear on bailii though or if publication would be affected by the Telegraph article.
Unlikely to be published until proceedings conclude – and they have not concluded yet. But @judiciaryuk now reports that case transferred to Pres, so there may well be a judgment in due course.
Sorry, but what sensitive issues? I’m ashamed to be a citizen in a country which could do this, let alone to a foreign national from a country, Italy, which has arguably better health care than we have. She should have been sent back home, to the place where she was best known. This dystopian horror story will do wonders for our national image once it does the rounds. Welcome to UK social services, where half the staff are fascist and the other half practitioners of voodoo.
I don’t know what sensitive issues specifically, and nor do you. But it is easy to imagine a number of scenarios, all of which involve an anxious balancing of the needs of child and mother in long and short term. I don’t think we can really prejudge it until we know the facts and those are pretty thin on the ground at the moment. There is a useful blogpost over on Suesspicious Minds which helps explain the framework under which decisions will have been made.
Check out the bi-polar blogs; the fear from them is palpable. Did you know that lots of women have mental health issues around pregnancy? Refuse your medicine and you might go mad for a while. Punishment for a woman doing that is having a baby torn from her uterus. Our court of protection is becoming like a Nazi court. They had old man judges observing due process, listening to advice from men in white coats. They had plenty of secrecy too, secrecy that protects all the wrong people.
[…] Sunday night I posted a short blog post asking for information when a judgment was published on Bailii. Lawyers found nothing, even though […]