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Trick Deportation

August 13, 2011 permalink

Christopher Booker updates a recent story on a boy being forcibly returned from Ireland to England. The family was misled about the time of a court hearing, ensuring that it took place without them. The boy, ordered deported by default, was sent back to foster care in England the same day. Sadly, this kind of court misdirection is commonplace in child protection cases.

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'Child protection': As one poor boy is deported, another comes home

Further developments in two ongoing cases of boys taken away from loving mothers.

As one poor boy is deported, another returns

An update to my report last week on the 14-year old boy who, after six months living happily in Ireland with his mother, was due to be taken back to England at the behest of English social workers.

On Tuesday the care order under which he was being held by Irish social workers expired. The mother was informed that the hearing for renewal of the order had been adjourned. Just before 10 o’clock, she was told it had been reinstated. She and her solicitor rushed to court, only to be told that the hearing was over. By an order that neither she nor her lawyer were allowed to see, and without a chance to challenge it, her son was to fly away that day. When he landed, escorted by his Irish social worker, they were met by a police car. On the journey to a new foster home, I gather, the distraught boy was sick, all over the social worker.

Elsewhere, there was a happier development in another case I have mentioned previously, concerning a mother who has been repeatedly arrested for supposedly trying to contact the son from whom she has been parted for seven years. He had been placed in the custody of his father, who he says maltreated him. On one occasion, the mother was imprisoned for two weeks after meeting her son by chance in the street and telling him “I love you”.

Last week was his 16th birthday. After secretly preparing for a long time, he rang her. Later that day they were reunited – after months when, he says, he had been shut away in a cellar and a garden shed. When a policewoman arrived at the house, following a report that he was “a missing person”, it did not take long to assure her that the boy was not missing but is at last living happily back at home with his mother, as he has wanted for years.

Source: Telegraph (UK)

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