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A further tribute to Dr. Michael Pelling |
Ivor Catt, 30mar04 |
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Dr. Pelling before three Appeal Court judges on 29mar04. I need to report that Pelling’s performance was awesome. He spoke for three and a half hours on a motion to have a retrial in the case of his son. He made it clear that he regarded this as a test case. He previously told Eugen that the minutiae of English/European court interaction made this the last chance to draw attention to the human rights issues involved in the English Family Courts, and to show that their present position was clearly untenable. [Pelling will presumably correct or clarify this paragraph later, which is not the main point of this article.] Single-handedly, Dr. Pelling has profoundly altered the structure of the current crisis for excluded fathers and their children. He will have a better grasp of his overall strategy than I do, but from my standpoint it is clear that something profound is going on. At a crude level, we might say that the decades-long plea by myself and others that Butler-Sloss and the other radfem and poodle-man Family Court judges communicate in some way with the most expert excluded fathers (which means those who are suffering at their hands, and who have been kept out of the reform process) has been answered, after a tragic ten or twenty year delay, and many unnecessary deaths and increasing civic disruption, by the extraordinarily expensive and awkward process of Pelling teaching appeal court judges in the environment of a court in the RCJ. However, they ignored the normal protocol of such an environment, which made it a little easier for the tutorial to progress. It is obvious that the three judges were at last willing to listen and to learn. The judges junked all protocol. They interrupted Pelling, and Pelling interrupted them. The trouble is, they have so much to learn in order to begin to get to grips with the crisis, that there will be a delay of a further decade or two and an ever-increasing death rate. As I wrote years ago, they were at the Last Chance Saloon, and they should have realised this a decade or two ago. It was clear to me (See my book “The Hook and the Sting”) more than a decade ago that the survival of the Family Courts was the issue, but they continued to sleep on, assuming that England was undemocratic enough to make it possible to attack and ignore half of the population forever with impunity. For some years we have pointed out that other Courts – Criminal, Queens Bench etc. – must distance themselves from the crisis in the Family Courts, or they in their turn will not survive the shutting down of the Family Courts. We really need a functioning Criminal Court system. I am pleased to learn that two of the judges yesterday were drawn from other Courts, not from the Family Courts. They need to consider their position, and that of their own branches of the Court System, in view of what they learned yesterday. Ivor Catt 30mar04 |
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Dr. Pelling bravely takes on Nelson Mandela’s role in England’s secret, corrupt Family Courts. In a way I had never quite comprehended before, I realized the role I could
play in court and the possibilities before me as a defendant. I was the
symbol of justice in the court of the oppressor, the representative of the
great ideals of freedom, fairness and democracy in a society that dishonoured
those virtues. I realized then and there that I could carry on the fight even
within the fortress of the enemy. – Nelson Mandela, “The Long Walk to Freedom”, pub. Abacus 1994, p375 Ivor
Catt, St. Albans,
Hertfordshire, UK, 30mar04 Cc Butler-Sloss, Higher Marsh Farm, Marsh Green, Exeter EX5 2EX |
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