Our thanks to R for pointing us to this remarkable story:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2529695/Mother-wins-right-stay-UK-baby-girl-stabbed.html

The Bangladeshi woman married her cousin in the UK. From the article:

Despite speaking no English and having never been to Britain before, she moved to be with him in a maisonette in Tower Hamlets, East London. Their daughter was born in June 2008. The marriage was unhappy and in March 2009 the 30-year-old’s husband presented her with a one-way ticket for her to return to Bangladesh. He also obtained a court order banning her from taking the child out of the country.

The mother told relatives she would kill the baby and kill herself rather than be separated from her daughter, saying: ‘If I can’t have her then no-one will.’ Her husband left her alone with the child and returned to find her stabbing the girl in the stomach. He grabbed the child and ran upstairs with her – with the mother chasing after him with the knife – before she was overpowered by his brother.

The Old Bailey heard she left a 1.6in stab wound and the baby would have died if the thrust had not caught one of her ribs. Afterwards the woman asked her husband: ‘Why couldn’t you come in later? Then I could have finished her off?’, the court heard.

She was jailed for five years for attempted murder. After she was released:

… the family courts gave her the right to see her daughter under tight supervision for an hour three times a year – and she has now won the right to stay in Britain permanently. A judge ruled it would be ‘very cruel’ to stop her from seeing the child. She won her case using Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights – the right to a private and family life.

A woman who tried to murder her nine-month-old baby girl has more ‘human rights’ than vast numbers of loving fathers who are denied access to their children by the family courts system. How is their treatment by the system not even more cruel? And the treatment of their children likewise, at the hands of a courts system which doesn’t require vindictive malicious mothers to behave like responsible adults.

The article refers to the European Convention on Human Rights, which is downloadable through this link:

131227 European Convention on Human Rights

Article 8 of the Convention states:

Right to respect for private and family life

1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.
2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

If the multiple ways in which fathers in the UK are assaulted by the family courts system don’t infringe both sections of Article 8, I’m a profiterole.