We have continuously reported
on the case of Teresa Kirk who was jailed for seven
weeks in a prison that once housed Rose West, all because she defied orders to
bring her brother Manuel back from Portugal care home.
Article Mental Capacity Act
It
is our sad duty to say that Manuel sadly passed away.
Dejectedly,
the court used secrecy laws that banned Teresa Kirk from even publishing his
obituary.
An astonishing story that has
come to represent all that is wrong with Britain’s shadowy Court of Protection
(CoP). A court so powerful that, until yesterday, Teresa was forbidden from
placing an obituary notice to inform friends of her brother Manuel’s death. The same friends that the state insisted he
be closer to, the same friends that the state said he’d be happier living near
rather than in his home country of Portugal!
British social workers who had
decreed that her brother, who had dementia, must spend his twilight years in a
Devon care home rather than the Portuguese idyll that she wanted for him in the
country of his birth.
Teresa Kirk was sentenced to
six months for refusing to sign legal papers giving social services control
over the life of Manuel.
Still Teresa was barred from
telling her shocking story, thanks to that draconian ruling imposed by the
Court of Protection which decreed — even posthumously — that it was in Manuel’s
‘best interests’ for him to remain anonymous.
Even placing an obituary
notice in Devon, where Manuel had worked at a hotel for nearly 50 years, would
have put her at risk of being returned to prison.
In its earlier reports about
Teresa’s battle to help her brother and her imprisonment, the Mail was
prohibited from giving his name or saying they were brother and sister. He
could only be described as a ‘man’ — and even the name of his pet cat, Tuna,
could not be made public.
Only yesterday, with the
lifting of the reporting restrictions by the Court of Protection, can the story
of Teresa and her brother Manuel Martins finally be told.
Teresa, a retired accountant and grandmother of four from Brighton, recalled how her ordeal unfolded after she refused to sign the legal papers transferring responsibility for her brother’s life from herself to social services.
‘I was never going to sign the
papers giving social workers the power to say where Manuel had to live. When I
was a little girl, he would put me on his shoulders and run with me through the
countryside near our parents’ home on the Portuguese island of Madeira.
‘Soon after he came to England
to work, I followed him. We remained close all our lives and I was not going to
abandon him to state social workers in his last years.
‘He would have become
depressed in Devon without the sunshine. He loved the gardens and the warm
weather where he lived.’
Even after she appealed the
sentence successfully, she was unable to reveal any details that would identify
her brother.
Social workers thought
otherwise and had recommended that Manuel should be admitted to a care home in
England, staying close to old friends. One of the planks of their argument was
that he would be happier in the UK, where he had a cat.
This is one of those scenarios
that I just simply do not understand, how can anyone who does not know a person
have their best interest in mind? A
court system able to act in this heartless, incompetent and unsympathetic way.
I wholeheartedly agree with John
Hemming, the former Lib Dem MP and family rights’ campaigner, who said: ‘The
gagging order imposed did not protect Manuel, but only those who made the
decisions to imprison Teresa and run an expensive exercise to try to get her
brother back to Britain from a Portuguese care home. ‘The CoP seems reluctant to relinquish
control of people even in the afterlife. It’s time this court stopped hiding
what goes on there.’
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