The Ashya King Stunt.

As a founding member the UK has been granted the privilege of hosting the annual Summit of the North Atlantic Treat Organisation (NATO) in 2014. Although I don't know how or when this decision was made the UK have since decided to host the Summit on September 4th and 5th (4&5/9/14) in Wales. This should have been a bit of a clue that my Welsh grandmother is going to be a major theme of the Summit.

This effort began last week with the publication of a report into child sexual abuse in Rotherham. This long running story centred around in excess of 1000 of young girls between 10 and 14 years old being subjected to sexual abuse such as rape and gang rape under threat of violence including being doused in petrol and being told they would be set ablaze if they didn't comply. The report found that the police, the council and associated agencies such as schools and hospitals knew that this was going on but just decided to let it happen. As the abuse of my grandmother was well documented with similar bodies the intention was that people would speculate whether everybody turned a blind eye in that case for the same long list of reasons that were suggested in the Rochdale case. The problem is that as lot of people have gone through my grandmother's case in a lot of detail so there are hardly any mysteries left particularly around the motivation.

A couple of days later the Rotherham story was forced out of the headlines by the search for Ashya King who is a 5 year old child with a brain tumour who was snuck out of hospital and taken across Europe to Spain by his parents who are Jehovah Witness although the mother is of Arab heritage. The search part of this story of course covered all the technical things you can do to track a persons movements such as border controls, number plate recognition cameras, cellphone tracking, computer hacking and good old fashioned public appeals.

The rest of the story though contains lots of quite strange connections to my life. For example a male Sovereign is a "King," I'm quite friendly with members of another King family and I might have once accidentally had sex with an Australian Jehovah's Witness. Apparently much like the Amish or the Mennonites they're allowed a year of freedom before deciding that they want to spend the rest of their lives annoying people by knocking on their doors in an effort to convert them. The King family's destination of Spain is also quite important because my lesbian wife lived there for a year and I visited there meaning that the Spanish probably have more knowledge about the nature of the relationship then the British.

The main comparison between the King case and my grandmother's is the legal issues surrounding a dispute over medical care. According to the King family they wanted Ashya's brain tumour to be treated using something called proton beam therapy which all sounds very science fiction. However I'm sure that if I checked my high school physics textbooks it would reveal that it simply involved using a beam of positively charged electrons to destroy the tumour using heat. Although this therapy has been proved to work in a limited number of cases it is still very new meaning that there isn't a facility in the UK. However the NHS will pay for patients to receive this treatment overseas, normally in the United States.

While the exact circumstances remain unclear it appears that the King family refused to allow Ashya to receive any form of treatment other then photon beam. This prompted his doctors to threaten to apply to the Court of Protection (COP) for an order permitting them to treat Ashya without the parents consent. If the King family are being truthful this shouldn't have been much of a issue because if the doctors were behaving unreasonably the COP would likely have refused the application and ordered that Ashya underwent proton beam therapy. 

As such it was highly irrational for the parents to respond by removing Ashya from any medical supervision and take him on a joyride to Spain where his chances of receiving proton beam therapy are nil. Therefore I think it is entirely reasonable that they've been arrested and are extradited to the UK without delay because their actions certainly raise significant questions about their competence to make decisions about Ashya's medical care.

I should point out that ultimately my grandmother's case was not decided by the COP but the High Court following an appeal against the COP's rulings. The case was heard by Justice Hogg who was famously involved in the Madeline McCann case. Due to their seemingly unquenchable thirst for publicity and fund raising the King family do seem to have a touch of the McCann's about them. The fact that Justice Hogg has yet to be arrested over her conduct in my grandmother's case which may constitute a crime against humanity is a source of constant embarrassment for the UK.

Of course between Britain being awarded the NATO Summit and the Ashya King case the UK has become extremely concerned about the terrorist threat presented by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and other associated jihadi groups. The manhunt element of the King story obviously provides a neat metaphor for the type of security measures that can be taken to combat that threat such as tightening border controls. One possible route for terrorists wishing to enter the UK would be to travel from Morocco to Spain and then up to the UK through France. Essentially the route taken by the Kings only in reverse. The debate around whether the authorities in Rotherham didn't act against the overwhelmingly Muslim child abusers over fears of being considered religiously intolerant has an obvious connection to the rise of ISIL.

Spain and France are also important to the discussion because they have both either gone through or are going through tough economic times. Although the western media has in the past been very keen to portray ISIL as almost undefeatable heroes they are in reality just a bunch of losers. Basically they're young men who have no purpose in their lives in Europe so they head out to Syria and Iraq in the hope of finding some purpose there. One factor that has always been key in preventing young men finding purpose in their lives has been a lack of economic opportunity. As such the UK was trying to pose the question of whether its own rather strange brand of economic austerity was leading to these men being "neglected" and then radicalised. Rather then being an attempt to tackle radicalisation this seemed to be the UK trying to further destabilise the Eurozone by playing on opposition to the very different austerity measures being championed by Germany. For example just last week the French President very sensibly sacked members of its cabinet that were opposed to necessary economic reforms.

The COP is also relevant to anti-terrorism efforts because it is a very secretive Court. So much so that I could be committing an offence simply by acknowledging that I have been involved in one of its cases. However it is still not as secretive as the anti-terrorism Courts. Not only are the press and the public not allowed to acknowledge that anti-terror trials are taking place it is often the case that the defendant is not allowed to know what crime they are being accused of let alone see any of the evidence being presented against them. This of course makes it near impossible for them to mount a defence going against some of the principles that have been core to the British legal system for hundreds of years. That of course raises the issue of human rights and civil liberties in anti-terrorism efforts. I must say though that through the measures that have been announced today that are similar to measures that have been used against football hooligans for the past 20 odd years the British government is actually being surprisingly reasonable when it comes to civil liberties. 

However the best way to reduce the number of ISIL terrorists prepared to attack the UK remains to be to kill as many of them as possible on the battlefields of Syria and Iraq.


19:45 on 1/9/14 (UK date).


Edited at around 11:00 on 3/9/14 (UK date) to add;

On Friday (29/8/14) Ashya King was made a ward of the COP which made it responsible for all decisions about his medical care. This was used to apply for a European arrest warrant which was executed on Saturday (30/8/14) when the Ashya's parents were arrested in Spain.

I suspect that the British authorities were hoping that this would lead to the Kings being quickly extradited back to the UK. However the Spanish Judge decided that they needed to review all the complex medical paperwork in the case and before that could happen the paperwork would need to be translated into Spanish. As a result the Court decided that the earliest it to reach a decision would be Thursday (4/9/14) afternoon - right in the middle of the NATO Summit.

As it is difficult for the UK to predict let alone control the decision of a Spanish Court this prompted them to back down. So yesterday the applied for the European arrest warrant to be withdrawn removing the need for an extradition hearing. However Ashya remains a ward of the Court and that will not be reviewed until a hearing on Monday (8/9/14). 

With no arrest warrant Ashya's parents were released from prison and have been granted permission to visit him in hospital. However as he is still a ward of the Court and because they have a history sneaking him out of hospitals I assume these are going to be supervised visits. Also if the Kings fail to return voluntarily to the UK for Monday's hearing it is extremely likely that this will be viewed as them forfeiting their parental rights leading to Ashya being taken into the care of the state.