A rising tide of anger across Europe at 'Nazi’ social workers
Last weekend, hundreds of Norwegians and foreign parents marched on the parliament in Oslo to protest children being taken into 'care' by the state
Christopher Booker
Even I was rather surprised to see a newspaper
headline reporting that the president of the Czech Republic had accused
the social workers of another European country of acting “like Nazis”.
As it happens, he was not talking about our own much-loved social
workers but those of Norway, who four years ago took two little Czech
boys into foster care, after one of them told a teacher at nursery
school that his Daddy had “groped inside his pyjamas”.
Although no other evidence was given for removing the children, and the
strain of the case eventually led their parents to divorce, the
Norwegian authorities have refused to return the boys to their
distraught mother, who has only been allowed to see them for 15 minutes
twice a year and forbidden to speak with them in Czech. It was this
which prompted the Czech president Milo Zeman to compare Norway’s child
protection system to the Nazis’ Lebensborn forced adoption policy.
Last weekend, hundreds of Norwegians and foreign parents marched on the
parliament in Oslo to protest about this and scores of similar cases,
such as that of a little Russian boy seized last October after he had
told his classmates that his mother had “knocked out his tooth”.
Although it was only a loose baby one, she was accused of “abusing” her
son.
All across Europe there is a rising tide of angry concern at the readiness of social workers in various countries,
including Britain, to remove children into foster care for similarly
vacuous reasons. I have reported here on the three-year battle of a
Russian-Latvian family living in Holland to get the return of two young
twins who were removed kicking and screaming by Dutch social workers and
police, because they spoke Russian not Dutch at home. This year a
senior Dutch judge finally freed the children on the grounds that the
reasons for their removal had been absurd. In 2013 I reported on how our
Court of Appeal ordered the return to Slovakia of two small boys who
had been held miserably in care for two years by Surrey social workers
for similarly trumped-up reasons.
In
February, after an extensive inquiry led by a Russian doctor, Olga
Borzova, a Council of Europe report called on member states, including
Britain, to stop the unwarranted removal of children in ways which
breached families’ human rights. Last month there was remarkable meeting
to discuss this issue at the Slovak embassy in London, attended not
just by representatives of all the eastern European countries but by no
fewer than 10 of our own High Court judges, led by Sir James Munby, the head of the Family Division.
There are signs that this immense scandal is at last being taken seriously by some of those who matter.
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