A baby comes home – but a mother remains in jail

A baby comes home – but a mother remains in jail

A girl taken from her parents in France has finally been returned, but Vicky Haigh's case has no such happy ending

Joe Ollis and Marie Black with their daughter Luna, newly returned home
Joe Ollis and Marie Black with their daughter Luna, newly returned home 

There were contrasting outcomes last week to two of the stories I have been reporting involving parents whose children were removed from them by our family courts. In France there were tears of joy when Marie Black and Joe Ollis were reunited with their baby daughter Luna, born in France in February but then seized by Norfolk social workers, to be brought back to England to live in foster care. Although this action had been sanctioned by a British court, a High Court judge ruled in May that the seizure was illegal, because Luna was born in France and was therefore outside UK jurisdiction.

Despite further prevarication by the social workers, they eventually obeyed the judge’s order that the child should be returned to France. Last week, finally, Luna was handed by a French court back to her parents. “At first,” they tell me, “she was quiet and withdrawn after her time in foster care, but now she is alert and cheerful.”

This is a landmark case which should give cheer to those scores of parents who flee abroad for the birth of children threatened with seizure by our social workers. For this reason, perhaps the British taxpayer’s expenditure on this episode – estimated at £250,000 or more – was not entirely wasted.

Rather less happy was the outcome of the Court of Appeal hearing on Wednesday at which, as I reported last week, the former racehorse trainer Vicky Haigh awaited a response to her appeal against a three-year prison sentence for breaching a “non-molestation order”. The order had prohibited any further contact with the daughter whom Miss Haigh had lived with for the first seven years of the girl’s life. The breach occurred when she walked by chance into a petrol station and saw her daughter sitting alone in her ex-husband’s car. She opened the door to speak to her, the girl’s father came back, and there followed a brief, heated exchange, lasting under a minute. For this, Miss Haigh received the longest sentence, by far, ever handed down for any breach of such an order, even those involving physical violence.

Only allowed to observe Wednesday’s hearing via a video link to her prison in Yorkshire, she heard allegations that she had been planning to kidnap her daughter (for which no evidence has ever been produced), and reference to a very hostile judgment on her case made last year by Lord Justice Wall, head of the family courts, which he ordered to be published. The judges agreed to reduce her sentence by nine months, the most they could consider without allowing her, under the rules, to be freed immediately.

John Hemming MP, who has followed her case closely, described her unprecedented sentence as “ridiculously harsh for what was a minor technical breach of a court order”. That same morning, one newspaper reported that a woman who had a long record of criminal violence and had been found guilty of breaking a champagne bottle over one man’s head, then using it to stab another, walked free from court with a suspended 12-month sentence. The report was headlined “What does it take to be jailed?” The answer may lie , Mr Hemming suggests, more in the fact that Miss Haigh has been outspokenly critical of the failings of our family court system than in that brief encounter in a petrol station.

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