The Conservative Party's "anti-radicalisation" laws call on teachers and other public servants to report brown children who espouse "radical" ideologies — and now the other shoe has dropped, with the Family Division of the Judiciary promising to steal those children from their parents.
This is non-metaphorical Orwellianism. Whether you like or hate the ideas that some parent espouses, kidnapping children is never going to lead to a reconciliation between people who believe that the UK government has no legitimacy and the UK state.
Combine that with the rampant, violent Islamaphobia that has seized the UK polity — fuelled by the government, who have explicitly encouraged hate crimes — and you have a situation where more and more Britons will be liable to having their families destroyed at the whims of small-minded bigots.
Even worse, the proceedings in which children are stolen from their parents can be kept a secret, even from those parents.
he High Court Judges within the Family Division are now tasked with determining whether children will be made wards of the state based solely on suspicions of possible radicalization. Children torn from mothers and fathers in Muslim homes will be subject to the whims and inherently flawed watch of the larger citizenry. A citizenry, mind you, that has had its vigilance unduly ramped up by the government's past actions and requests. It's hard to imagine a better recipe for the unfair targeting of Muslim families than this. Unfortunately for all concerned, this same memo imagined just such a recipe, making things even worse.
Judges hearing cases falling within the description in paragraph 1 above will wish to be alert to: (a) the need to protect the Article 6 rights of all the parties;4 (b) the fact that much of the information gathered by the police and other agencies will not be relevant to the issues before the court; (c) the fact that some of the information gathered by the police and other agencies is highly sensitive and such that its disclosure may damage the public interest or even put lives at risk; (d) the need to avoid inappropriately wide or inadequately defined requests for disclosure of information or documents by the police or other agencies; (e) the need to avoid seeking disclosure from the police or other agencies of information or material which may be subject to PII, or the disclosure of which might compromise ongoing investigations, damage the public interest or put lives at risk, unless the judge is satisfied that such disclosure is "necessary to enable the court to resolve the proceedings justly" within the meaning given to those words when used in, for example, sections 32(5) and 38(7A) of the Children Act 1989 and section 13(6) of the Children and Families Act 2014; (f) the need to safeguard the custody of, and in appropriate cases limit access to, any sensitive materials provided to the court5 by the police or other agencies;6…
UK Goes Full Orwell: Government To Take Children Away From Parents If They Might Become Radicalized
[Timothy Geigner/Techdirt]
