A (Children)

Judgment

Lord Justice Thorpe:

On 30 September this court heard an application for permission to appeal and a stay of execution from the order of Mrs Recorder Armitage in the Dewsbury County Court sitting in Leeds on 25 September 2009.

The application was granted, and both my Lords, Wall LJ and Sedley LJ, gave short reasons for granting permission and staying the execution of the judge’s order. Those short reasons reveal their shared disquiet at the boldness of the order below, which transferred the residence of three children from their primary carer, the mother, to their father, whose contact to the children had sadly been non-existent for some 17 months.

The parties married in 1997, and the children with whom the court is concerned are K ameel, aged 8, Sameer, aged 7, and Sara, aged 3 . The application for a defined contact order was issued by the father on 27 February 2008, and in June 2008 there was a hearing, from which a very significant order emerged.

The mother had developed really quite florid allegations of domestic violence, including an incident when she asserted that Kameel had been struck by her father with a crutch. The order of June 2008 recorded very significant concessions by the mother: firstly, that she was no longer relying on the asserted history of domestic violence as a bar to contact and, second, that she was prepared to co-operate in the initiation of a contact regime.

That concession was shortlived and within a week it was withdrawn, with the consequence that arrangements had to be made for a fact-finding hearing, which took place in front of the Recorder in January 2009. She heard a lot of oral evidence and it enabled her to come to some firm conclusions, which are set out in a careful judgment of 29 January extending to some 32 pages. It is quite unnecessary to analyse the detail of her findings. Enough to say that she rejected both parents as being reliable or truthful in all detail.

She found some of the allegations proved. Importantly, she dismissed completely the allegation that the father had assaulted Kameel with a crutch. That, I think, she even held to have been an invention, a deliberate invention of the mother’s. Essentially she found that this was a case of a very volatile marriage and that apportionment of blame was six of one and half a dozen of the other. She concluded her judgment, which was clearly very carefully considered, reduced to writing and then read, with the essential finding that the volatility