Christopher Booker writes:
It was appropriate that 2014
should end as it began, with two stories exposing more disturbingly than ever
the shadowy workings of the most sinister and secretive court in our judicial
system.
A year ago it was the case, first
revealed in this column, of the visiting Italian woman secretly ordered by the
Court of Protection, without her knowledge, to be subjected to a caesarean
section, so that her baby could be handed over to Essex social workers.
Last week it was the case, which
I reported here in June, of Kathleen Danby, a 72-year-old grandmother, who was
finally arrested in a Liverpool theatre after the Court of Protection had
secretly sentenced her, in her absence, to three months in prison, for hugging
her granddaughter.
This 19-year-old girl, said to
have a mental age of nine, was taken into “care” by Derbyshire social workers
in 2007, after her father had been seen roughly grabbing her and taking her to
safety when she ran out into a busy road during a temper tantrum.
For this he was also imprisoned,
as he was twice more – once just for waving at his daughter when he saw her
passing in a taxi.
The girl ran away from care 170 times because the only two
people she wanted to see were her father and her grandmother, Mrs Danby, who
was only allowed brief telephone contact with her once a month, strictly
monitored by a social worker.
Last April, after Mrs Danby and her granddaughter had been recorded on CCTV illicitly hugging each other in a car park, Judge Martin Cardinal, in the Court of Protection, punished her, in her absence, by giving her a three-month sentence, saying, “I am sure this grandmother needs restraint”.
But Derbyshire police were unable to arrest her because she lives in Orkney, outside their jurisdiction.
Last weekend, however, the police
learnt that Mrs Danby planned to attend a performance by Ken Dodd in Liverpool.
They called in their Merseyside colleagues, who summoned Mrs Danby out of the
theatre just as the performance was about to begin.
This tiny 72-year-old woman
was then held overnight in a scruffy police cell, without food or access to the
medication she needed for a liver complaint.
She was not allowed to tell anyone
where she was, or given access to a lawyer.
After a sleepless night, Mrs
Danby was bundled into a police van (so roughly that her resulting bruising was
later photographed) and taken away for two more nights and days in a prison run
by G4S, with her family now desperate to know where she was.
Only after they
managed to contact John Hemming MP and another newspaper, which publicised her
plight, was she brought to court on Wednesday and, at the last minute, given a
lawyer, who was handed a three-inch-thick file on her case outside the
courtroom.
Mrs Danby was led into court in
handcuffs and only permitted to visit the lavatory handcuffed to a policewoman.
Thanks to her promise not to repeat her “offence” – not to mention the media
interest and the presence of Mr Hemming – the judge agreed that she had “purged
her contempt”, allowing her to walk free from the court.
But she had no money,
her handbag was back at the prison, her luggage still in her Liverpool hotel –
and her return ticket back to Orkney had run out.
Only thanks to outside help
was she able to collect her belongings and return safely home.
All this raises so many serious
question marks over Mrs Danby’s treatment that one scarcely knows where to
begin.
The government website makes clear that anyone arrested has the right to
tell someone where they are, and the right to free legal advice. They have the
right to food and to any medical help required.
None of these rights, it seems,
was observed. “Guidance on the Use of Handcuffs”, on the website of the
Association of Police Officers, makes it equally clear that “any application of
the use of force to the person of another is an assault. The use of handcuffs
amounts to such an assault and is unlawful unless it can be justified.”
How does
this equate to the treatment of a frail old woman who is less than five feet
tall? In none of these instances does it appear that Mrs Danby’s rights were
properly respected.
This is all profoundly worrying
in itself, and we have two MPs already promising to raise these issues in
Parliament – Mr Hemming and Mrs Danby’s own MP, Alistair Carmichael.
But a much
wider concern it raises again is the quite extraordinary powers given to the
judges in this mysterious Court of Protection when it was set up by the Labour
government in 2005.
Only in the past year or two, thanks to the valiant efforts
of Lord Justice Munby to lift something of the suffocating veil of secrecy
surrounding the workings of this court, has it begun to come to light just how
far it seems able to stand all the basic principles of British justice on their
head.
It was this, for instance, that
allowed us to know that Judge Martin Cardinal, the same man who secretly
sentenced Mrs Danby to three months in prison, had earlier similarly jailed in
secret Wanda Maddocks.
She was the 50-year-old woman he had found guilty of
contempt of court for removing her desperately unhappy father from the council
care home where he was being so ill-treated that she feared for his life.
Even
now, although too many such horror stories continue in the shadows, it is only
occasionally that they can emerge to public view.
But just as worrying as the role
of the Court of Protection is the astonishing part played right across our
“family justice” system by the police.
When the police show themselves willing
to behave as they so routinely do in such cases, to whom can we look to enforce
the law?
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