M (Children : Care Proceedings : Passport Order)

Judgment Approved

Sir James Munby, President of the Family Division :

This is an appeal, pursuant to permission granted by McFarlane LJ on 25 November 2016, from an order made by Roderic Wood J on 13 July 2016. Granting permission, McFarlane LJ commented that:

“The proposed appeal … raises important points of principle and jurisdiction … [and] concerns an issue (namely the making of an open-ended passport order at the conclusion of proceedings) which is a matter of importance and about which there is apparently no extant authority.”

The background is very shortly stated. Roderic Wood J had been concerned with proceedings under Parts 2 and 4 of the Children Act 1989 concerning the seven children of the appellant father. For reasons which there is no need for me to rehearse, the outcome was that the older three children were made the subject of care orders to the local authority and the four youngest children were to go and live with their mother in Canada. They have now left this country and moved to Canada.

The appeal relates to that part of the order Roderic Wood J made on 13 July 2016 which related to the father’s Libyan and British passports (the father is by birth and upbringing Libyan), held by the court pursuant to passport orders, the most recent made on 31 July 2014. The order so far as material was in the following terms:

“The father’s application for the return of his passports is refused.”

Explaining why he was making that order, Roderic Wood J in his judgment said this:

“Essentially this application and how I respond to it depends significantly on whether I have come to the view that I can now trust the father at all and, if so, the extent to which I can trust him. I do not consider it to be an easy issue and I have set out above the compelling reasons which might lead me on one view of the evidence to grant the application, but I well recall and cannot put to one side, the incredible lengths to which the father went to remove the seven children and their mother to Libya and the description of the horrors which followed, including their wrongful imprisonment, in effect, by him and several members of his family at his command once in Libya, and I have to pay attention to what happened thereafter, including the continued and repeated breaches of working agreements which underpinned not only their arrangements with the local authority but also which this court relied upon to show that court orders were not meanful.

… both parents chose