Gagged Dad’s lawsuit (A -v- Cornwall Council)

A ground-breaking court case

I attended a quite glorious court hearing yesterday.  The outcome, for which many of the public who attended the hearing would have been praying, was a cause for jubilation.

The claimant (a.k.a. plaintiff) was Gagged Dad, a mystery guest blogger here who cannot be named in order to protect the privacy of his family.  The defendant was Cornwall Council, specifically its Social Services department.  The cause of action was the council’s direct infringement of Gagged Dad’s Article 8 right to respect for his family life.  I had drafted Gagged Dad’s Particulars of Claim against Cornwall.  I was permitted to represent Gagged Dad in court yesterday.

The anonymous father and occasional guest blogger on this blog who uses the pseudonym Gagged Dad in order to protect his family from being identified by readers of this blog, has contributed the following guest posts to this blog:

Two year-old’s contact stopped with “homophobic” dad

With Gadded Dad in mind, last year, when the House of Lords was considering the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill, I myself commented upon a glaring omission from the various amendments to that Bill tabled in the House of Lords, in my own post

Why foster carers, but not natural parents?

 

The story so far

When Gagged Dad referred his own two year-old son to social services, alarmed that the child’s mother had become a contact denier, social services vetted this natural parent for political correctness.  In the words of the judge yesterday, it was as though he Gagged Dad had been applying to become a foster carer with the local authority, rather than a concerned parent applying to the local authority for help in maintaining contact with his illegitimate son, in order to safeguard him from paternal deprivation.

Because Gagged Dad failed this political correctness vetting – Gagged Dad does not approve of same sex marriage or abortion – social services actively encouraged the mother’s contact denial, even to the extent of becoming proactive in many different ways between 3rd April 2013 and the present day, to prevent contact that would not have required any co-operation on the part of the mother.

Another post of my own on this blog (about a different legal problem, which affects another of my clients) is entitled Human rights and harassment.  That post concludes as follows:

If the Tories, having read this little blog post, also repeal the PHA along with the HRA, or amend RIPA to route PHA claims against intelligence services to the IPT the way that HRA s7(1)(a) claims are routed to the IPT now, I suppose you will have to blame me for this, for having discovered the loophole in RIPA, and having mentioned it publicly, here, today.

I have a similar project on the go, by the way, this time to find a way of challenging child safeguarding social workers, without having to use other secret courts that are not much better than the IPT, the family courts.  I think I have made a discovery here that will be even more important, and a great blessing for children who have one parent whom they never see (for example).  I’ll leave it until another day to tell you about that though.

I reveal today how Gagged Dad managed to take on social services directly, without becoming embroiled in further stressful legal action in which his respondent would have been the mother (who is best left alone), and in which the social worker would have played the more-or-less unassailable role (again) of court-appointed expert witness, whose “expert” testimony would therefore become more-or-less impossible to challenge, in the setting of a hearing held in secret.

How is Gagged Dad managing to make the local authority accountable in open court for its interference with his family life, without dragging his son’s mother through the courts, something that he does not wish to do, for noble enough reasons?  Gagged Dad is suing the local authority under the Human Rights Act 1998 section 7(1)(a), over its ongoing role in the contact denial that interfered with Gagged Dad’s private and family life, that was not related to its role as the employer of an expert witness (the social worker) in the private family law proceedings that ought not to be discussed openly by either of the parties.

 

What Gagged Dad accomplished yesterday

In August, Gagged Dad had defeated a strike-out application and a summary judgment application, by which Cornwall’s social workers hoped to put to death Gagged Dad’s challenge to their supposed right to vet natural parents as though they were mere applicants for jobs as foster carers.

Yesterday, Gagged Dad defeated more-or-less identical second strike-out and summary judgement applications, which would have had the same effect.  He also defeated an application on the part of Cornwall Council for hearings in his human rights lawsuit to be held in private.

The case continues, with a directions appointment in six weeks or so.

 

Credit where credit is due

Albert Einstein once remarked that he was disappointed that the great and the good of Germany, whom he expected to oppose the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, barely lifted a finger to oppose Hitler when push came to shove.  Instead, and to Einstein’s surprise, Hitler’s only persistent and determined opponents turned out to be the little people who were rank-and-file members of what Einstein called small religious sects, people whom Einstein had least expected to oppose Hitler at all.

My client Gagged Dad and I would like to thank those who turned out to watch yesterday’s hearing, and the God to whom many of them were praying silently for justice to be done.  Thirteen supporters of Gagged Dad attended the hearing, from Gagged Dad’s church, from Christian Voice, from Families Need Fathers and from UK Column.  Five of those who wanted to observe the proceedings had to wait outside for the judge’s decision to be communicated to them by those inside, because there was insufficient seating for everybody who wanted to observe the proceedings inside the room in which the hearing was held.

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In the interests of the privacy of Gagged Dad’s family members, I would ask readers please not to speculate as to the identity of Gagged Dad or to publish this information if they think they know who Gagged Dad is.  Gagged Dad’s identity must remain a secret known only to a select few, at least for the time being.  However, the practice of vetting natural parents for political correctness as though they were merely applying to become foster carers, needs to be held up to critical public scrutiny.