Fathers4Justice verdict in Britain - By Anton Jaks

Many people in the mainstream press, as well as in government were not happy with the recent verdict in the trial of two Fathers 4 Justice protesters who were found innocent of false imprisonment.

One of those is Marcel Berlins. Marcel Berlins is a legal commentator who is best known for his weekly column in The Guardian newspaper. He is also a lecturer in media law at City University, London.^[1] He was the presenter of BBC Radio 4’s legal programme Law in Action and retired after 15 years in 2004.

He wrote, today, in his column in The Guardian newspaper:

I was a little worried by the jury’s verdict in the trial of the two fathers’ rights protesters who handcuffed the former children’s minister Margaret Hodge at a law conference in 2004. She was handcuffed to one for 20 minutes, until released with bolt-cutters.

The defendants were charged with false imprisonment; they admitted the facts, but said their actions were a political protest against a justice system under which the courts discriminated against separated fathers wanting to see their children. The jury found them not guilty. I do not think that drawing attention to a personal grudge against a system by harming and frightening someone in the way they did should be allowed to be a valid defence.

The key phrase here is “personal grudge against a system”. What Mr. Berlins doesn’t get, and this is true for many in the judiciary as well as many politicians and certainly most bureaucrats, is that this is far more than personal grudge. We are talking about a father’s children! His reason for living, his reason for breathing.

When a system acts with such impunity to dispassionately divide up natural families, simply turning a deaf ear to the pain and suffering that this causes, or arrogantly asserting that the system, and the people administering it have the best interest of the children and everyone else involved at heart, and that makes it all OK, then it is time for common people, like for instance members of juries, to step in and at least partially set things right. In legal terms, this is called jury nullification. It drives judges and prosecutors nuts.

Women in the feminist movement who constantly disparage these protesting fathers as “angry men” often demonstrate a similar attitude to that of Berlins. To steal one of their own phrases, “They just don’t get it.”

What these people don’t get is that having your family (and your life) torn apart by an unfeeling, heartless bureaucracy and judicial system is actually far worse than if you had lost your family to some disaster or accident, leaving them dead. Dr Richard Harrington argues in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine that children who lose a parent may be less susceptible to depression than those whose parents divorce. I believe that the same can said of fathers.

Knowing that your children are living and growing, just across town, or in the next state, but a court order or other completely artificial and unnatural barrier makes it impossible for you to be there for them is like constantly having a wound reopened and savaged. It is painful, it is devastating, and there is no natural way to heal from this kind of thing.

It is part of any decent man’s psychological make up to get angry when his family is threatened. Men have throughout the history of humanity on Earth fought and been willing to scarify their lives for the safety and wellbeing of their families.

What our modern bureaucratic Family Court system does is to dehumanize everyone in it, and it is destroying the very fiber of our civilization.

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