A grandmother has been sentenced to three months in prison after she was filmed giving her granddaughter a hug.
Kathleen Danby, 72, was jailed by the secretive Court of Protection, which decided she had disobeyed its order that she should not see the teenager.
Under a draconian judgment kept secret from the public, Mrs Danby had been banned from making contact with the girl, who is 18 but has learning difficulties.
She was told she could only speak to her on the phone once a month at a set time, with social workers listening in. Mrs Danby was ordered back to court when social workers heard that she had met the girl at a model railway exhibition. Police also presented CCTV footage of her hugging her granddaughter outside a pub.
Mrs Danby was not at the hearing in Birmingham in April to give her version of events but Judge Martin Cardinal said the CCTV showed she was in contempt. He ordered that she be jailed for three months and issued a warrant for her arrest.
However Mrs Danby, who lives in Orkney, said yesterday that no police officers had arrived to execute the warrant. ‘I haven’t been jailed simply because I refused to go down there to court,’ she said, adding that she would refuse to go to prison simply for making contact with her granddaughter.

Mrs Danby said the girl was moved into care in Derbyshire in 2007, when she was 11, a year after being removed from her father in Orkney.  He was banned from seeing her after he was convicted for ill-treatment for restraining her from running into a busy road while she was having a temper tantrum, Mrs Danby said.
She said it was a ‘spurious excuse’, adding: ‘Social services completely cut off contact which was of course cruel to her in the extreme.’ The girl’s father has been jailed twice for trying to contact her – once for waving at her taxi as she travelled to school – she said.
The teenager was in the care home against her will and had run away 175 times, Mrs Danby said.

Judge Cardinal is the judge who sent Wanda Maddocks to jail in secret for trying to free her 80-year-old father from a care home where she feared his life was at risk.
Judge Cardinal jailed Miss Maddocks without publishing her name or making any details of her contempt public. She served six weeks in jail. The case came to light more than six months later and led to new rules so that no one may ever again be imprisoned without their name being published.

That is disgraceful.

I hope the BBC gets hold of this and puts it on mainstream TV

The Government promised yesterday that the report would be a major influence on a White Paper that would overhaul legislation on the emergency protection of children. A crucial element is Lord Clyde's suggestion that courts become more actively involved in the quest for place-of-safety orders for suspected abuse victims.

In a move which appears to weaken the role of Scotland's unique children's panel system, he recommends that sheriffs, not justices of the peace, hear requests for children to be removed from their families and that social workers provide more documented material to sheriffs when seeking orders.

There was an Establishment cover-up of horrific child abuse because powerful figures looked after themselves, former judge Lady Butler-Sloss warned today.
Senior members of British society in the past did not think child abuse was as serious or important as protecting politicians and other members of the elite, she suggested.