One of the advocates in the network here in Ireland which assists families fleeing here from the UK to prevent their children being seized by the family courts has replied below to Hedda. The fleeing families have been widely covered by UK and international TV channels and the programmes can be seen on
www.ectopia.org
His reply
Hedda may wish to revisit his comment “Among those being removed are the nutters endlessly fuming about 'Secret Family Courts' and posting highly defamatory claims about innocent people”
One of those ‘nutters’ just happens to be the President of the Family Division himself: Sir James Munby, as widely reported, not just by the Telegraph but across many legal publications:
“Judges would benefit from greater public scrutiny, the President of the Family Division has suggested.
Speaking at an event on social media and the family courts earlier this week, Sir James Munby claimed modern judges are prone to making mistakes because they are “grotesquely overworked” and “tired”. One solution to this problem, he suggested, would be greater transparency in the family courts – a recurring topic with Britain’s most senior family law judge.
According to a report in The Telegraph, Sir James insisted that judges should not be “immune from criticism” and that journalists should be able to say “the whole thing [ruling] is flawed, the premises are all wrong, the facts are all wrong“.
But, he explained:
“The simple fact is that at present journalists can’t do that without access to the evidence and without reporting what went on in court and saying well, this judge seems to be listening to a different witness than I, and the impression I got from listening to this witness was X,Y,Z and the judge says A,B,C. So I think there are very real problems there.”
The veteran judge added:
“We’ve got to be much more honest about this, and if we are honest about it, things go wrong.”
Many parents “in these care cases” leave family court without understanding what happened during the hearing, the President suggested.
“And that is an indictment of our system, not of them.””
Of course it’s not the first time the respected judge has weighed in on the ‘secrecy’ of the family courts, and he has pursued a series of reforms to bring greater transparency. In 2014 he issued guidance aimed at encouraging judges to publish judgments on Bailii, he also introduced a pilot of family hearings being held in public, and the release of documents to the media. The latter to include case summaries, skeleton arguments of the case, and documents which are issued during fact-finding hearings.
It can hardly be said that the ‘nutters’ don’t have a point. As Munby also said removing a child from their parents is the most draconian thing the State can do absent the death penalty. Hedda’s crass comment that paints all the critics of the secret family courts as ‘nutters’ is not only insulting to many thousands of families who have experienced this form of ‘justice’ behind closed doors with little or no public scrutiny, but the comment is clearly not based upon the facts themselves. I do wonder who these ‘innocent people’ are that are being defamed?
The family courts are not secret but do lack scrutiny, they preserve the privacy of those involved in the proceedings, particularly children. What they also do is prevent individuals being able to talk openly about their own families, many find themselves ‘gagged’ by injunctions, imprisoned for doing so. Free speech is curtailed by the family courts more often than many think.
My personal experiences in supporting families who find themselves before the family courts have confirmed that neither the courts nor judges are inherently corrupt, the system that drags families there though has a level of corruption by its inherent institutionalised approach. The proponents of child protection work to a formula, they have a modus operandi (see
www.nkmr.org/en/import/2521-the-rhetoric-case-by-linda-arlig) and it is the tainted ‘evidence’ that they present to courts that leads many families to level accusations of corruption at the court itself, when in reality a judge is simply working on the balance of probabilities based on what they see and hear from the social workers. When the system works not on a transparent, objective level but a formula that actively fabricates evidence, makes accusations that have no basis in fact or reality, that uses ‘hired guns’ of psychologists who misapply psychological assessments and make sweeping claims of ‘traits’ (not diagnoses, just ‘traits’) of mental health issues that have never been seen previously by any medical professional, then it is understandable that many will seek to expose it.
Of course the removal of the ‘nutters endlessly fuming about 'Secret Family Courts'’ only adds fuel to the fire; if the ‘nutters’ didn’t have a point then why would anyone need to have them removed?
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