D (A Child)

This is an application brought by Mrs Daniels for permission to appeal orders made by HHJ Yelton sitting in the Cambridge County Court in May of last year. It is an extremely sad case, for Mrs Daniels is the mother of two sons who are now young adults. There is Matthew, who was born on 30 May 1991 and he is now 21 years of age, and there is Andrew, who was born on 6 February 1994, and he will shortly be 19.

The case is tragic because both of these men are handicapped and the general nature of their problems is in the autistic spectrum. There have been proceedings way back as far as 1997, and tragically the applicant has had no contact with these children since December 2000. Mrs Daniels says that I have the date wrong by two years, and whether it is 2000 or 2002 it is a decade. It is a decade or a little bit more, and direct contact was prohibited in 2005. In 2008 an order was made under section 91(14) preventing any application without leave during the children's minority. When Matthew reached the age of 18, his application for a non-molestation order by the Official Solicitor was granted and his case remitted to the Court of Protection.

The order made by HHJ Yelton on 25 May was a parallel order relating to Andrew. He granted a non-molestation order against Mrs Daniels, and I can well understand Mrs Daniel's sense of injustice as the mother of this boy, and that sense of injustice is founded upon her passionate conviction that she has been the victim of conspiracy and fraud, perpetrated by the father of the two sons, by public authorities, and by the courts. She has this morning, in her submissions, ranged wide over the history of the case. She has expressed with passion her sense of frustration, her sense that she is the true victim within this whole sad history. I concentrate only on the orders made by HHJ Yelton in May. They were in a sense absolutely consistent with the judicial management of this very sad case all the way through. The judge did not misdirect himself in law. He exercised the discretion. He came to a conclusion which he explained in a short judgment and that is simply not appealable. These responsibilities are left with the judges in the county court. Were I to grant any sort of permission I would not be satisfying Mrs Daniels' quest for a more subjective form of justice. I would not be giving her solace from the sense of wrong that she attaches not just to this order but to a whole series of orders that have been made by other judges in other courts over a litigation history which is now more than 15 years old.

So I am afraid, as Mrs Daniels has already anticipated, the only order that I can make today is an order refusing the application for permission.

I will direct that a copy of the judgment that I have delivered this morning be made available to Mrs Daniels, and if that is only achievable at public expense then I will say that that should be done.