![Case No. NE24C50736 - [2025] EWHC 1767 (Fam)](https://backend.juristeca.com/files/emisores/logo_0FrGysm.png){kind=logo}
The Parents and Paternal Uncles
The Parents and Paternal Uncles
The Mother gave evidence via an interpreter and I make due allowance for difficulties in giving evidence in that manner and the inevitably intimidating circumstances of giving evidence in a courtroom when the stakes were so high for her and her children. She was shielded by screens from seeing the Father, and the paternal uncles when they were on the video monitor in court.
The Mother made a direct plea to the Court at the conclusion of her evidence for the return of her children, asking to be given another chance. However, during her evidence she was largely unemotional and was able to deal with questioning without apparent difficulty. I am afraid that I found her evidence to be evasive and frequently inconsistent. As examples:
In her oral evidence she invited the Court to accept that having not had any kind of relationship with Mr V in Austria, beyond having met him, he came over to England from Austria, by a small boat across the Channel, after she spoke to him on the telephone once she had come to England, and they married within a week of his arrival. She told me that this was about a month after her arrival in England but she told the Immigration authorities when completing an application for support on 14 July 2022, five days after she had arrived, that she had already re-married. Information she gave to Dr Swart and Ms A also suggests that she had formed a relationship with Mr V whilst in Austria.
The Mother denied that Mr V had assisted her to abduct the children but she would not provide information about who had assisted her including to drive her and the children through Austria, Germany and France.
On arrival in England the Mother told immigration officials that the children had no contact with their Father but he was in regular contact with them. She explained that she thought she was being asked whether they had contact with him in England, but she had only been in England five days when she stated that they had no contact. She did not even give the Father’s name in any documentation even when asked for his details.
The Mother gave very little information to the Court about Mr V even though she said that he would play a significant role in the children’s lives if they were returned to her care. Her evasiveness about Mr V and his non-engagement in the proceedings are obstacles to the Court being satisfied that the children would be safe in her/their care. What little is known about Mr V is itself troubling. He was arrested for smashing a window at the family home, with the children present, after the Mother and he had separated. The Mother seemed to think that the incident was less serious because two of the children were in the garden at the time. Mr V’s supervision of two of the children in hospital was so poor that healthcare staff referred concerns to the Local Authority. He was involved in the children’s care on occasions when the children were left at home alone, or when S was found walking near to a motorway at the age of 3. The Mother could have chosen to give more information about Mr V but did not do so.
The Mother has given frankly inconsistent evidence about important events, for example, in her accounts of how S came to be walking alone by a motorway. She said that the family were all asleep at about noon when she left the house to go to the shop because it was a Sunday, when in fact it was a Tuesday during school term time. She told the Court that S had stood on a chair to open the kitchen door to exit the house but in a witness statement she had said that he had climbed out of a window. Her evidence was similarly inconsistent in relation to a number of other important incidents.
The Mother told immigration authorities in a signed form which she was assisted to complete that the Father had raped the children. No such allegation had been made in Austria and she told the Court that she had never said that. The form speaks for itself and the allegation appears in it twice. On the first occasion the allegation is set out in quotation marks indicating that it was word for word what she had said (translated). It was completed on 14 July 2022 and she did not correct it until her third statement in March 2025.
In her response to the threshold document, the Mother has accepted that:
“Once in the UK M changed the given dates of birth of the children and adopted her maiden name as the surname of the children. This was in order to reduce the chances that the history of the family being exposed. M failed to advise the Home Secretary when seeking refugee status that the children had been abducted from the care of the [Austrian] authorities.”
This was dishonest of her. The Mother managed to conceal the fact that she had abducted the children from care in Austria for nearly two years until it became known to the Local Authority in May 2024.
The Mother lacked insight into the consequences of her actions. She appeared to believe that her abduction of the children was justified because they had said they wanted to be with her. In her written evidence she suggested that a social worker or family time support worker in Austria had all but encouraged her to abduct the children because they wanted to live with her. She showed no awareness that her abduction had caused further trauma to the children and had deprived them of stability and the benefits of therapeutic and other interventions. She showed no awareness of the consequences for the children of removing them from any contact with the Father.
The Austrian Court had found that the Mother was responsible for poor supervision of the children, leading on one occasion to R very nearly dying by drowning. If there is a culture in her country of birth of not supervising children (as she claimed) she will have known that Western states expected more supervision of her children than she had given them in Austria and yet she claimed not to know what was expected when Police in the Northeast of England gave her advice about not leaving her children unsupervised. Furthermore, she kept repeating the failing even after one of her children was seriously endangered by walking beside a motorway at midday on a Tuesday when only three years old.
The Mother did not dispute that she had been given considerable support in Austria before the children were taken into care, and that she had been given support and advice in England before the children were again removed from her care, including the offer of support from the Angelou Centre which provides support and assistance to women from ethnic minorities in circumstances such as her own. She did not take up those offers. It was quite clear to me from the Mother’s evidence that she resents any interference with her family and other than admitting “mistakes” in abducting the children and bringing them across the Channel in a dinghy, and allowing S to wander beside a motorway, she does not really believe that she has let the children down at all.
The Father also gave evidence via an interpreter and he was not present in court but reliant on a video link. He had engaged only fleetingly in proceedings but did attend and engage in the hearing. He was disadvantaged by his own lack of initiative in engaging with his solicitor and the Court prior to the hearing but also by the fact that neither the allocated social worker nor the Guardian had taken any or any adequate steps to contact him, to work on starting some form of contact with the boys, or to provide him with more information. Both accepted their failings in those respects. He accepted that he had been violent to the Mother, including having put his hand over her mouth and, on one occasion, damaging a tooth with a mop-handle. However, he said that he had good relations with the boys when he had fortnightly face to face family time with them when they were in the care of Austrian authorities, and his claim is supported by documentation about family time there. He revealed for the first time in his oral evidence in cross-examination, that in late 2022 he had travelled to England by small boat across the Channel (making him the seventh person in this case to have done so) to see if he could find his children. He had a suspicion but no hard evidence that they were here. He claimed asylum on arrival to allow him to have some status here. He left after three to four months without completing that claim for asylum having not found his children. He had, however, obtained a telephone number for Mr V and had had an argument with him over the telephone. He denied threatening Mr V but this is the incident that led to a report to the police about a suspected domestic incident at the family home in December 2022. The Mother said at the time that she suspected the Father was in England. She could have given the children an opportunity to see the Father and enlisted the help of the Local Authority to support safe contact, but she chose not to do so. She had never revealed his identity to the authorities in England.
The Father variously told the Court that the Mother had stolen the children away from him, poisoned their minds against him so that they are now hostile to him (which they are) and that he did not want Mr V anywhere near his children. And yet he supports the return of the children to the Mother. More than anything else this speaks to his distrust of child protection and child welfare institutions and the overwhelming importance to him of children being cared for within a family. I am concerned that he supports a return to family care at all costs rather than thinking more objectively about the interests of the children. In a similar vein he proposed that P and Q should live in Austria with his brother G, and R and S in Austria with brother H. They both gave evidence and I found them to be open, well-meaning but lacking any detailed knowledge of the children and circumstances of the case. When the Father was reminded of the fact that P and Q have had to be separated because of their aggression, indeed their violence, to each other he swiftly changed his proposal for the arrangements in Austria. He had not thought through the fact that the children had been in state care when last in Austria or how the Mother would be able to see the children in Austria given that she might well be arrested for child abduction on her return there.
The Father robustly denied sexually abusing the Mother, as she has alleged in these proceedings but not in the proceedings in Austria. He said that whilst they argued they had a warm relationship. That evidence does not sit easily with the evidence from the Austrian authorities and the Austrian Court decision. There were no fewer than six restraining orders made against the Father. He readily admitted suffering long term mental health problems including depression and that he continues to take medication. The Austrian Court found that his parenting was impaired by his mental health.