This is a judgment of Lord Justice Jackson written in plain English. It concerns a successful appeal of the lower court’s decision to sanction removal of O, a newborn baby, from his mother, V, who has learning difficulties.
Appeal against the making of a placement order. Breach of the Adoption Agency Regulations 2005. Placement order set aside.
The case concerned children living in the London Borough of Barnet (LBB) about whom the LBB had serious concerns. In January 2020 the 6 children were aged 5, 9, 14, 17 and (twins) 18. Safeguarding referrals were received in November 2019 and January 2020. The children’s parents were a diplomat and his wife, and in November 2019 refused consent for the children to be spoken to at home or at school, relying on diplomatic immunity. After the January 2020 referral the police informed the LBB that diplomatic immunity prevented a police investigation. LBB spoke to the children at school, and the children made allegations of significant physical mistreatment, on occasions requiring medical treatment. The parents claimed that diplomatic immunity prevented the LBB from placing any information about them before the court.
The local authority was granted leave to withdraw care proceedings where the children had been unlawfully abducted to Pakistan and were not likely to be returned. The court however had made the children wards of court and ordered that they be returned to the jurisdiction. The wardship was continued and the judgment passed to the police and Interpol.
Application by the mother to terminate the father’s parental responsibility pursuant to s 4 (2A) of the Children Act 1989 granted. Permission also given to change the child’s surname
The court was concerned with O who was born in 2007 and thus 13 years old at the time of judgment. She is a citizen of the Democratic Republic of the Congo ('DRC') and arrived in the UK around 2nd August 2020. It appears that O’s father died in prison in 2018 and in July 2020 O, her brothers and mother were arrested. O evaded detention and was cared for by a friend of her mother’s K, who eventually brought her to the UK and left her at a bus stop.
This case concerns the legal framework and circumstances in which an application under the inherent jurisdiction for the revocation of a lawfully made adoption order will be granted.
Permission for publication of substantive judgment in financial remedy proceedings refused, reporting restrictions order to remain in place
The Court of Appeal ordered a rehearing of a mother’s application for leave to oppose an adoption application, because of procedural unfairness. The local authority’s failure to ensure that the necessary material was available to the mother and the court was criticised.
The Court of Appeal confirmed that a special guardianship order can co-exist with a care order and remitted for re-hearing the question of whether or not the SGO in this case should be discharged.
This was an appeal in respect of an order protecting the identification of the Appellants’ children in any reporting of judicial review proceedings. The Respondents were their children’s primary school and the Council responsible for it.
A local authority’s application not to assess a grandmother as a carer was granted and the grandmother’s application for a Special Guardianship Order or a Child Arrangements Order was dismissed.
On 21 April 2021, Mrs Justice Knowles handed down the 16th reported judgment in proceedings brought by a wife, Tatiana Akhmedova (‘W’), in her attempts to enforce an award made at the conclusion of financial remedy proceedings in December 2016 against her ex-husband, Farkhad Akhmedov (‘H’).
The case concerned an application by an NHS Trust which would permit them to not provide blood transfusions or treatment involving blood products to a 17 years and 4 month old patient, DL.
Keehan J’s judgement (89 pages) was delivered at the conclusion of a fact-finding hearing on 3 applications: contact to children in care, discharge of care with the making of a special guardianship order to long-term foster carers and permission to change the children’s surname. It describes what found to be “egregious and long-standing failures” by the local authority and he questioned whether its children’s services were fit for purpose. [226-227]
The 3 children were 17, 13 and 11. A fourth child C had died at the age of 14 in 2019.
A judgment determining, as a preliminary issue, whether the English court had jurisdiction to hear M’s maintenance application brought pursuant to Schedule 1 of the Children Act 1989 following earlier proceedings issued by F in Monaco.
