to all GN's living in France 4 year old boy missing

I heard on the new tonights that the family will be reunited at 10.00pm (Spanish time), this evening.

news tonight

They have left now.

POGS I'm pleased to hear that they have been released. The details about the Spanish judge were broadcast on this morning's television news about an hour and a half ago. Maybe things have changed or the journalists got it wrong (not unheard of after all).

I cheered when I heard that the authorities had seen sense and released the parents.
I hope the paparazzi will leave this poor family in peace.

I am pleased that the parents and child are able to be together. That is the right situation.

However I think that the whole truth will not be known. We can all speculate on what we believe the truth is, based on our personal experiences, prejudice, gossip etc etc.

In the centre there is a very sick child with sad and desperate parents, concerned medics and police all trying to do what they think is the right thing for the boy.

Penstemmon

Precisely. I whole heartedly agree with you.

If there has been an injustice, that needs to be acknowledged.

It should be easy enough to hold an enquiry to find out what really happened. That would be both fair to all parties concerned and hopefully point the way to better practice in future similar circumstances.

How about a massive public enquiry involving not only the parents and the hospital but Hampshire police, the CPS, various British courts and judges, social services, probably more than one Spanish police force and a Spanish judge or two?

Pettalus I do not feel an injustice has been done and I feel the hospital had no choice but to act to protect the welfare of a very sick child carted off across Europe in a car.

"Ashya King is taken from ward at Southampton General hospital, seven days after extensive surgery for an aggressive brain tumour.

They might have had a feeding machine but what about serious risk of cranial bleeds and swelling after brain surgery seven day previously the family were not in a position to deal with that.

I do wonder why, if as said on the news just now, they had been offered treatment at a proton beam centre in Prague they have dragged the poor little mite off to Spain. Why not leave him in hospital in the UK until a bed was available in Prague. He could have had a parent to look after him in the hospital and one to go to Spain to sell the property there, which had been an explanation of that journey.

www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/09/01/ashya-king-brain-cancer-parents_n_5748588.html

"A centre in the Czech Republic which offers proton therapy said it was willing to help Ashya if his doctors in Britain agree. The Proton Therapy Centre (PTC) in Prague confirmed it was able to treat the boy immediately if he was eligible for therapy, with the cost of the treatment to be sorted out later."

Good morning JessM

I think any enquiry or investigation could be limited to the hospital and police here, though I am no expert on these matters.

I suspect questions are already being asked within these organisations anyway.

If the family decide to sue the hospital for damages, we will probably get some idea of what really happened.

Following through on this case, and other cases like it, is important in my view since it gives the individual some protection against unfair treatment by more powerful individuals or organisations. As a demonstration of this a black policewoman is reported in today's paper to have won a second case against the Metropolitan police. She had earlier been awarded damages for discrimination, after which the police had tried to smear her by devious methods.

Nelliemoser you may not feel an injustice has been done but many people do.

It would be fair to all concerned if an investigation took place and was then published.

Why would be want to avoid doing that?

Support for the post by Nelliemoser at 08.53.

I fully agree with Nelliemoser. There was nothing wrong with the initial reaction of the police who had to follow up on a case in which a child might be endangered. The fault, if any, lies with the CPS who made the decision to treat the parents as criminals.

I read JessM's post of 8:33 as ironic - perhaps I am wrong. If so, apologies.
The irony being that all that would cost more than any treatment that the parents are seeking for their child.

I think there will be an enquiry.

We just need to know why, at the point when it became clear that the boy was being well cared for, the proceedings against the parents were not called off. Why it went too far.

Nelliemoser perhaps the parents didn't trust the UK hospital to not give him the radiation treatment they did not want him to have. I think they had lost all faith in them.

Each individual action in this sad case was justified in view of the circumstances at the moment decisions were made. Naturally the publicity has mostly been for the plight of the child and his parents, but

The hospital staff had a very sick patient and had offered to help get a second opinion. Standard procedure to warn the parents of all the dangers of treatment and give them their opinion of how likely it was that the treatment the parents were considering would be help in this case. They may also have thought that the parents were likely to try unconventional and dangerous therapies. (That is something that people at their wits end can be tempted into)

The parents were anxious about their very sick child, and did not believe that they would be allowed to take him elsewhere for treatment. They removed him from his hospital bed without warning and took him out of Britain. Understandable, but not sensible.

When the hospital was worried about his disappearance they informed the police. Standard procedure.

The police pulled out all the stops to search for a missing child. Standard procedure.

When the missing child was found, those who had removed him were detained. Standard procedure.

The child was admitted to a suitable hospital. Standard procedure.

Two people who may have been unlawfully taking a child out of the country faced arrest and possible charges. Standard procedure. If they HAD been strangers kidnapping a child, they could not have been held without arrest for more than a short length of time, and would then have vanished.

It was then decided not to charge them and to release them.

All this over the space of a couple of days. Decisions could not have been made without consultations and communications between various otganisations, which all take time. An enquiry may sift all the statements from those involved but finding somewhere to place the blame could be impossible.

It would be interesting to know exact timescales of when each decision was made and how long it took to be communicated and acted on.

Some of the 'facts' in your longer post Elegran are being contested by the family.

Lawyers are saying there were no real grounds for issuing the warrant for the parents' arrest. They were not breaking the law.

What the consultants may have 'imagined' the parents might do (in terms of dangerous treatments) is neither here nor there.

What we do know is that there was a complete breakdown in communication between the consultants and the family with threats being from the Consultants towards the family.

There is a huge body of opinion in this country that this case was mismanaged to an abysmal extent. If it wasn't, it can only benefit the hospital and the police if this is made clear.

Whatever happens, the child needs to be treated elsewhere now.

Blame for what? Acting in what they believed were the child's best interests?

As others have pointed out, it is not just about feeding, but about the care out of hospital setting of a child who was only a few days post-op from major brain surgery. The danger of complications was there, and he needed to be where his condition could be properly monitored.

The only problem that I could see in the response was that the parents finished up being criminalised - that may simply be a spin-off of the current process by which the child was sought and found; and there is something to be said for looking back on that aspect and thinking whether there might be some way of amending that process in these sorts of circumstances. The parents are not criminals - they are frightened, sad desperate and misguided maybe, but not criminals. And the others involved are not inhumane or unkind - they are just doing their best in a difficult situation.

Any enquiry needs to be positive and directed at changing procedures, if that is needed to avoid criminalisation, rather than laying blame. How the media do love to find someone to blame. And an enquiry needs to be as low-cost as possible.

It's sadly a dreadful media scrum but Mr King has now spoken to a barrage of reporters. Just watched on Sky. Outside while being pursued by reporters he says his son only has months to live and he claims he told Southampton hospital he was taking his son out of their care. He admitted he did not tell them that day but they knew of his imminent plans.
The main thing surely is the family are united today.

If he only has months to live, he needs to be gently cared for in the love of his family and not hurtling round Europe looking for last ditch efforts to prolong his life at whatever quality. Poor little chap.

Elegran whilst I agree with much of your post, I am not sure about this statement:
Two people who may have been unlawfully taking a child out of the country faced arrest and possible charges. Standard procedure.

Someone in the media may have said this, but surely it is not unlawful for parents to take a child out of the country, even if that child is sick?
Parents take very sick children abroad for treatment, to Disney, to Lourdes, and it is not against the law.

If it is unlawful then it has huge implications for all of us and our families.

When police abroad get a message that a child has been taken out of the country and is being sought, they are pretty certain to detain the adults they find with the child until the details are clear.

People can only be detained for a couple of days (I am not sure how long, I think it is defined in hours) without an arrest, so if clarification takes a while, arrest is the only way they can be kept from leaving. The implications that appear to have been made here are that the removal was in some way illegal, so a charge was on the cards.

I can't imagine that parents taking their children for treatment elsewhere are normally considered unlawful, but given the media coverage and language, it may have appeared to be so to the police in Spain.

Portuguese police have recived so much criticism for their handling of Maddy's case that perhaps the Spanish police were being extra careful?

I agree rosequartz. I think the parents must have felt they were forced to remove their child from the hospital and the UK without warning after being threatened with an Emergency Protection Order if they did not cooperate with the treatment regime proposed by the UK medics.

I believe they were honest with the doctors about the treatment they wished to explore but felt their request was being ignored or blocked. If I put myself in their shoes I'm not sure what I could have done differently.

However much we might need to believe that doctors and other powerful authority figures are always reasonable, caring, and honest people I'm afraid many of us know this is not always the case. I agree with others that there needs to be a full enquiry into the sequence of events to protect the civil liberties of all of us in the future.