Children are being used as pawns or are being overlooked entirely in Ireland’s family law system, the Oireachtas Justice Committee heard on Wednesday.
David Walsh of Men’s Voices Ireland said that the rights of children are being lost in the tussle between competing parental rights and being “used as pawns in custody battles”.
“Current practice puts the adult at centre stage whereas the child’s welfare should be paramount and his/her fundamental right to know and spend time with both parents.”
He added that joint custody in a real 50:50 sense occurs in only about 1% of cases.
The Committee also heard from Special Rapporteur on Child Protection Dr Geoffrey Shannon who said that the common law adversarial system is “highly unsuited” for these types of case as “parents are focused on winning”.
This can be psychologically damaging for both the parents and their children, he added.
The Government should establish family law courts to properly protect the best interests of children before instituting a more liberal divorce regime, according to Alan Shatter the former Minister for Justice, Equality and Defence.
Commenting on the proposed divorce referendum in a letter in the Irish Times yesterday, he said it was crucial that a specialist independent family court structure be first put in place. He said it was needed “to ensure the best interests of children and the welfare of dependent spouses are properly protected”.
He was responding to a report that childcare cases are being heard in overcrowded courts alongside criminal cases, in sometimes dilapidated courthouses, without basic facilities or privacy for families.
The welcome given by Islamic authorities to a recent European Court of Human Rights’ judgement on blasphemy underscores the need for the ruling to be appealed. That’s according to Grégor Puppinck, PhD, of the European Centre for Law and Justice, an international, Non-Governmental Organization dedicated to the promotion and protection of human rights in Europe and worldwide.
In E. S. v. Austria, the Strasbourg Court validated the conviction of an Austrian lecturer for “defaming” Muhammad by comparing his marriage with 9-year-old Aisha to “paedophilia”. According to the European Court, these statements sought to demonstrate in a “malicious” way that Muhammad is not a “worthy subject of worship” and thus constituted a “malicious violation of the spirit of tolerance, which was one of the bases of a democratic society”. The ruling was handed down as Ireland removed the reference to blasphemy from its Constitution.
The prestigious Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the highest authority of Sunni Islam, and Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan welcomed the decision.
However, Mr Puppinck said the decision allows Islamic authorities “to justify their own repression of freedom of expression in religious matters.”
An application for appeal of the ruling has been lodged and on March 19, the Court must decide whether it agrees to refer the case to the Grand Chamber of the Court for a new judgment.
Pro-life vigils took place in a number of counties at the weekend outside GP clinics that facilitate abortions.
Details of the pro-life presence was documented on social media of groups in Galway City, Balbriggan, Navan, Graiguenamanagh, and Dingle. Placards carried slogans such as: ‘At 9 weeks, I have milk teeth buds and tiny toes’, ‘Doctors should harm not heal, let me live’, ‘Adoption is the option’, ‘Doctors save lives not end them’, ‘Human rights begin in the womb’, ‘One life taken: many hearts broken’, ‘Women’s rights begin at conception’, and ‘Say No to abortion in Graiguenamanagh’.
The only images used was of an embryo in the womb at an early stage of development.
Nonetheless, a report appeared in the Irish Examiner that the pro-life activity outside a GP clinic in Graiguenamanagh, which is located beside a library, caused a lot of “upset” to children using the library.
A council in London has approved an exclusion zone around an abortion clinic, making it only the second local authority in the U.K. to take such action to prevent pro-life activities.
Richmond Council, which covers an area of southwest London along the River Thames, approved a decision to make it a crime to attempt any form of interaction with staff or visitors to a center run by the British Pregnancy Advisory Service in the Twickenham section of London.
The policy comes less than a year after Ealing Council, also a London local authority, used a Public Spaces Protection Order to prevent pro-life activists from approaching people or praying within 200 meters of a Marie Stopes clinic.
The activists reject allegations of harassment and say they gather to offer advice and support and pray peacefully.
The Ealing policy is due to be challenged legally in the Court of Appeal, and it has been criticized by the Catholic bishops of England and Wales.
A Christian teenager in Pakistan was recently abducted and forcefully converted to Islam, according to International Christian Concern. And now her abductors are using the country’s legal system to keep her from returning home.
The Christian persecution watchdog group reported that last month, 13-year-old Sadaf Masih was abducted by three men. The girl’s family reached out to her abductors for her safe return, but after eight days, the abductors told them that Masih was married and had converted to Islam. They then showed the family a marriage certificate which falsely claimed she was 18, an age old enough to get legally married in Pakistan.
When her family protested, the abductors threatened them and warned that if they tried to contact the teen, there would be “consequences of the law.”
ICC notes that abductions and forced conversions to Islam are common for religious minorities in Pakistan, as an estimated 1,000 women from Pakistan’s Christian and Hindu communities are abducted, raped, and forcefully converted to Islam each year. Pakistan ranks as the fifth worst nation in the world when it comes to Christian persecution, according to Open Doors USA’s World Watch List.
William Stark, regional manager for South Asia at ICC, said rape is used as a weapon to entrap victims, and conversion and forced-marriage is used to prevent any legal recourse: “Another disturbing element of forced conversion cases is the issue of custody. When abductors claim a victim has been married to them, especially when the victim is a woman, they maintain custody over their victim. This makes it especially difficult for Christian women who have been abducted, forcefully converted to Islam, and forcefully married to their abductors to provide testimony against their abductors.”
The Pro-Life Campaign has strongly criticised the Government’s decision to consider using Irish taxpayers’ money to fund abortions in developing countries.
Commenting on the move, Eilís Mulroy of the Pro-Life Campaign it is both “paternalistic and imperialistic for our government to adopt an attitude that Western countries know what’s best for developing countries and how they should regulate the size of their populations. What Ireland should be concerned with is improving maternal healthcare at home and abroad so that women and their unborn babies can both thrive.”
She added: “Instead our government is joining forces with the most radical international pro-abortion organisations who seek to impose their worldview of pushing abortion at every turn while neglecting to put in place genuine programmes that would safeguard the lives of both mum and baby during pregnancy.”
The Irish Times reported on Monday that the Government is ‘likely’ to lift the ban on Irish State aid going to fund abortions now that domestic policy on the issue has changed. Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) is included amongst a number of planned new State aid initiatives. The Department of Foreign Affairs have said that they are “researching and scoping the range of SRHR partners and interventions that we currently support and how we might deepen our support and engagement with them into the future.”
These partners include UNFPA – the United Nations sexual and reproductive health agency
A group of pro-life activists protested President Michael D Higgins in Dungannon, Co Tyrone for signing the State’s new abortion regime into law.
Rosemarie Shields, a former SDLP councillor who defected to Peadar Tóibín’s Aontu party, said they had gathered to show “that the North does not want to be next” in introducing an abortion regime. “We want to prove to every woman and every child that we can provide a society that protects them all,” she said.
The President was there to open a new Catholic school. Catherine Sewell, one of the protesters, said it was “not right” that Mr Higgins should have been invited to the school.
“The fact that a Catholic school invited him after he signed in the abortion law in the Free State, and countless babies have been murdered from January because of it, is not right, things like that can’t happen,” she said.
600+ GPs have submitted a petition to the Irish College of General Practitioners (ICGP) to trigger a new Extraordinary General Meeting (EGM) to discuss the issue of abortion.
The doctors have been thwarted twice in the past in their efforts to hold such a meeting. The first time signatures were ruled invalid for having been collected digitally. The second time a meeting was held but motions and votes were not allowed. This latest effort has well over the 350 physical signatures of full ICGP members required to automatically trigger an EGM under the rules of the Companies Act.
Dr Valerie Morris of the Medico Legal Alliance said clarity is best achieved by an EGM being convened to debate and vote on specific motions dealing with TOP (Termination of Pregnancy). She said: “We look forward to the upcoming EGM and would like to thank all those Irish GPs who took the time to sign the petition in the interest of democracy being upheld in our College, the ICGP.”
Four British doctors have filed a legal challenge against the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) accusing the College of using an illicit means to force the organisation to abandon its longstanding opposition to euthanasia.
The RCP announced that it would conduct a poll of its members on euthanasia in January. This attracted great controversy by requiring a 60% ‘super-majority’ in favour of any outcome or else the College would change its stance to ‘neutral’. The four doctors have said this move is unlawful on the basis that it is “unfair, irrational, and a breach of legitimate expectation.”
The RCP, which represents more than 35,000 doctors, has long been formally opposed to the legalisation of euthanasia. In 2014, 57.6% of its membership opposed a change in the law would legalise assisted suicide. However, its latest poll aims to remove the College’s formal opposition to such a legislative change.
The group of doctors have argued that use of a ‘super-majority’ vote on such issues is without precedent in professional organisations in the UK. They have said that it appears to be a tactical move to give a strong boost to the campaign to change the law on assisted suicide.
