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Archive for the ‘Children’ Category

Updated | In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled that a mechanism should be put in place to review whether convicted sex offenders should remain liable after their release from prison to notify the police of where they live or plans to travel abroad. In June 2011, the government published draft legislation to “ensure that strict [...]

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Updated | SG v St Gregory’s Catholic Science College [2011] EWHC 1452 (Admin) (17 June 2010) – Read judgment Most people have their first taste of injustice at school. This is hardly surprising: an institution containing hundreds of teenagers for whom rebellion is a biological imperative is always going to be difficult to control. In [...]

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R (on the application of E and Ors) v The Director of Public Prosecutions [2011] EWHC 1465 (Admin) – Read Judgment In a case involving rather distressing facts, the High Court has quashed a decision of the Crown Prosecution Service to prosecute a 14-year-old girl (identified only as “E”) for the sexual abuse of her [...]

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E (Children) FC [2011] UKSC 27 – read judgment ; see previous post for summary This case shows some of the difficulties thrown up by the interesting tension between the primacy of children’s interests implied by Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights and the controls on child abduction exerted by the 1980 Hague Convention. The Human [...]

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In the matter of E (Children) [2011] UKSC – read judgment The Supreme Court has ruled that two girls, aged seven and four respectively, be returned with their mother to Norway, after she had removed them without the father’s consent. The decision was made largely under the Hague Convention on the Rights of the Child [...]

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R. and H. v. United Kingdom (no. 35348/06) – Read judgment This ruling from Strasbourg sheds little light on how Article 8 can help adoption procedure, but it does illustrate how courts and agencies are having to square up to the deepening crisis in adoption rates. Newspaper and charity campaigns are vocal about this issue but little [...]

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Shoesmith, R (on the application of) v OFSTED & Ors [2011] EWCA Civ 642 (27 May 2011) – Read judgment In April 2005, Sharon Shoesmith was appointed as Director of Children’s Services at Haringey London Borough Council.  The appointment by a Council of such an officer is a statutory requirement - Children Act 2004 s.18.  “Baby [...]

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I asked in a recent post whether journalists need to attend court hearings to report accurately. The post arose from judgment in a family court case involving a mother’s abuse of her baby. The judge took the unusual step of criticising the Sunday Telegraph’s Christopher Booker’s reporting, which he called “unbalanced, inaccurate and just plain [...]

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The Department of Education today published the final report of Professor Eileen Munro into the child protection system in England. After extensive consultation, the report concludes that the social work profession needs to be freed from a compliance culture and stifling levels of central prescription in order to allow social workers to have more time [...]

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L (A Child: Media Reporting), Re [2011] EWHC B8 (Fam) (18 April 2011) – Read judgment The thought of being personally criticised in a reported judgment would make most lawyers break into a cold sweat. Some journalists wear such treatment as a badge of honour. But surely it is professionally embarrassing for a high court [...]

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In a modern liberal democracy we take for granted the fact that laws apply to all individuals and are enforced by the courts without special consideration of religious beliefs they may happen to have. But for a while at least there was a very real danger of the dissolution of the divide between private orthodoxy [...]

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H and L v A City Council [2011] EWCA Civ 403 - Read judgment In a decision bound to stir up strong feelings, the Court of Appeal has found that disclosures made by a local authority to other organisations of a person’s conviction for a sex offence against a child and future disclosures proposed by the authority [...]

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A (A Child) v Cambridge University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust [2011] EWHC 454 (QB)- read judgment A High Court judge has ruled that a seven-year-old child with severe disabilities caused by medical negligence during his birth should be the subject of an order that prohibits their identification in any newspaper report. The order was granted [...]

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  There probably aren’t many people who want to know what ‘goes on’ in the Court of Protection more than me; it’s what I spend much of my time trying to fathom. An outsider would be forgiven for thinking that this branch of Her Majesty’s Court Service doesn’t feel that case law in this tangled [...]

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Johns v Derby City Council and Equality and Human Rights Commission (intervening) [2011] EWHC 375 (Admin)- Read judgment Religious views opposing homosexuality are a legitimate fostering concern and the local authority’s approach to this question did not constitute religious discrimination. The claimant husband and wife applied to the defendant local authority to be approved as [...]

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