The press recently reported the case of Garry Johnson, a father of two, who has been forbidden from mentioning his sons in public for the rest of his life. His son has just turned 21, and after wishing him a Happy Birthday on Facebook he was duly summoned to the secret family courts, where he found himself charged, convicted and sentenced to 28 days in prison. While waiting in a cell to be taken to prison he had a heart attack, and was rushed to hospital where he was shackled to a bed even while nurses were treating him. You would have thought that he was a convicted terrorist rather than a proud and devoted father.
We don’t normally commend Liberal Democrats here, but I’d like to mention MP, John Hemming, as a man who seems to have taken a keen interest in injustices such as these over a long period of time. Indeed most recently he has been involved in trying to help a US journalist gain a visa to visit the UK. No other journalist has been banned in the last decade. Her speciality is ‘institutionalized cultures of corruption’, so we can probably imagine why our own Government thought her persona non grata.
But back to John Hemming, MP. He was kind enough to answer some questions about the state of our secret Family Courts. Of course we can understand there is a need for some privacy in such proceedings, but at present they are able to prosecute and persecute family members almost without challenge.
Hemming’s main concern is that ‘there are large numbers of miscarriages of justice arising from malpractice‘. He did agree with me that if the proceedings were all published as a matter of course, with personal details being redacted, then this might allow the activity of the court to be comprehended and criticised if necessary. He thought that this woul certainly be a ‘possible solution‘.
I did ask, what reform should take place in Family Courts to prevent what appears to be injustices such as those recently reported? And Hemmings proposed that, ‘There needs to be more guidance on court orders to allow people to complain and there needs to be greater transparency‘.
But he concluded, as many of us will certainly agree, ‘Some judges should be sacked‘.
The secretive doings of the Family Courts are truly disturbing – Christopher Booker’s regular reports (DT) on their anti-family activities can spoil your Saturday evening. So it’s good to see the cause taken up by a LibDem MP, and of course on CHW. Let more light be shone on these sinister courts.
‘Sack some judges’, says MP.
Yes I agree but let that ‘some’ be many, Baldrick of Blackadder fame determined that more than two beans was ‘some beans’, no I change my mind let that many be legion.