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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/8771232/Couple-denied-legal-help-while-lawyers-make-1m-removing-their-children.html

Couple denied legal help while lawyers make £1m removing their children

Their English is poor, they are reduced to tears by their inability to understand what is going on in court, yet they are denied help in presenting their case.

Mother and child are often torn apart by our system of child protection Photo: ALAMY

By Christopher Booker

8:23PM BST 17 Sep 2011

Ever more disturbing becomes that particular case of children snatched from distraught parents that I have written about here more than any other. Dozens of times in the past 18 months this couple have been in court, trying to challenge the extraordinary allegations made against them by social workers. Yet, although their English is poor and they have regularly been reduced to tears by their inability to understand what is going on in court, they have again and again been denied help in presenting their case.

Last Christmas, I paid £2,000 to one law firm to represent them until legal aid was arranged. But the Legal Services Commission turned down their application and the lawyer walked off the case. Ian Josephs, a successful businessman who runs the Forced Adoption website, paid £3,500 to another solicitor, who also walked off the case having done nothing. In February, when the couple wished to be assisted by Paul Randall-Joliffe as a McKenzie friend, he was thrown out of the court after apparently asking too many provocative questions.

On July 21, Mr Josephs, who has a law degree and has aided many families in family courts as a McKenzie friend, flew over from France to assist the mother, but was brusquely evicted from the court by Mr Justice Mostyn without any of the explanation required under court guidelines. (Mr Josephs’ complaint about this is being considered by the Office of Judicial Complaints.) Sabine McNeill, an expert IT consultant who had applied to assist the father, was treated likewise.

Oddest of all, on September 8, when Maurice Kirk appeared in court to assist, in front of yet another judge new to the case, the solicitor for the children’s guardian alleged that Mr Kirk was secretly recording the proceedings and furthermore that he was not Mr Kirk but Mr Randall-Joliffe, who had already been excluded from the court when she was present. I am told that the judge therefore ordered Mr Kirk’s arrest and he was marched off to a police cell. Here he had no difficulty in proving to the bemused policemen both his true identity and that he had no recording equipment with him, and was released. But yet again this meant the hapless couple were allowed no one to help them in their battle to win back their children, one of whom they have not been allowed to see for over a year.

Meanwhile, at taxpayers’ expense, the bill for three teams of barristers and solicitors, representing the council, the guardian and the children, may well have run to over £1 million. Truly our family courts all too often stand all the fondly-imagined principles of British justice on their head.

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SUNDAY 12 6 11:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/8570173/The-mystery-of-Haringeys-missing-Girl-X-makes-a-mockery-of-the-Children-Act.html

The mystery of Haringey’s missing ‘Girl X’ makes a mockery of the Children Act
The family of a girl taken into care have not seen or heard from her for 10 months, writes Christopher Booker.
 
Torn apart: the system of child protection is a national scandal
7:00PM BST 11 Jun 2011
The social workers of Haringey are notorious for having failed to prevent the deaths of Baby P and Victoria Climbié. But in their zeal to avoid any repetition of these tragedies, they are now at the forefront of those councils which have pushed the number of children taken into care to an all-time high. In all the cases I have been following where children have been taken from their families for what seem like dubious reasons, no single instance has been more disturbing than the plight of a 10-year-old girl seized by Haringey last year, who seems in the past 10 months to have vanished off the radar.

“Girl X”, as I shall call her, was taken into care on the basis of three allegations. One turned out to be so laughably erroneous that it was soon dropped; a second was likewise dropped when medical tests completely disproved the council’ s claims. The third, highly questionable, has still not been put to any evidential test.

The last time Girl X was seen by her mother was at a supervised contact session last August. Having complained of sexual abuse by her foster carer’s 19-year-old son, she asked to be given, as a birthday present, a journal with a lock in which she could record her “secret thoughts”. Since that day she has not been seen by her parents or, since the autumn, by her siblings, who are also in care. It seems she has since been interviewed by three people – an independent social worker, an independent psychiatrist and her guardian, all of whom reported that she wished to see and be reunited with her mother.