A 14-year-old boy filed a court case against his parents and has lost after they moved him from London to Ghana to go to boarding school.
The boy said his parents had tricked him into going to Africa, claiming it was a visit to a sick relative.
He said if he had known he was being sent to a boarding school, ‘there would have been no way I would have agreed to it.’
The High Court in London also heard from his parents who said they were worried he was being ‘groomed’ into criminal activity.
DEFENSE ARGUMENTS
In a written statement to the court, the teenager said: ‘I feel like I am living in hell. I really do not think I deserve this and I want to come home, back to England, as soon as possible.’
He continued, ‘I could also barely understand what was going on and I would get into fights.
‘I was so scared and desperate that I emailed the British High Commission in Accra as well as contacting the charity Children and Family Across Borders, who it is believed put him in touch with lawyers at the International Family Law Group.
‘I am from London, England, and I want to go back home,’ he wrote.
COURT RULING
In his judgement, High Court judge Mr Justice Hayden said he recognised that ‘this is, in many ways, both a sobering and rather depressing conclusion.’
He said that he was satisfied that the parents’ wish for their son to move to Ghana was ‘driven by their deep, obvious and unconditional love’.
The boy was at risk of suffering greater harm returning to the UK, he said.
He said that the boy’s parents believe ‘and in my judgement with reason’ that their son has ‘at very least peripheral involvement with gang culture and has exhibited an unhealthy interest in knives’.
STATEMENT FROM PARENTS
The boy’s father told the judge the couple did not want their son to be ‘yet another black teenager stabbed to death in the streets of London.’ – in reference to the murder of Kelyan Bokassa, the 14-year-old boy who was stabbed to death on a bus in Woolwich in January.
‘That was every parent’s worst nightmare’, the parents said.
The High Court heard that the boy’s parents had sent him because they feared for his safety in London.
In a statement, his mother said sending him to Africa was ‘not a punishment but a measure to protect him’.
Rebecca Foulkes, the lawyer representing the boy’s father, said the boy met 11 of the points on a checklist produced by the children’s charity NSPCC to indicate whether a child might have joined a gang or was being criminally exploited.
That included being absent from school, having unexplained money, buying new things, and carrying weapons.
His school claimed it had ‘suspicions about him engaging in criminal activities’ and had observed him in expensive clothes and with mobile phones.
