EU Referendum


Booker: the most sinister court in Britain strikes yet again


04/01/2015



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It was appropriate, writes Booker, 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 (reported by Booker) 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 (the stalwart Daily Mail) 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?