Legal advice will never remove the worry you’ll always feel for your children, but it can help you do your best to protect them. That’s why our Children Law specialists use the full force of the law and the resources available to us to take urgent and effective action.
We work with the police, the Courts, the Child Abduction Unit within the Ministry of Justice, Interpol and a raft of specialist organisations globally to either prevent abduction in the first place or to secure the safe return of your child.
Are you Eligible for Legal Aid?
Legal aid is available in a wide variety of circumstances for friends and family members when social care are involved with children.
On your initial contact, we can assess your circumstances and advise you as to your eligibility for legal aid. Our Children Law solicitors can help give advice, explain the Public Law Outline Process (PLO), offer confidential legal advice, and they can represent you in Care Proceedings at Court. We can also support you if you receive a letter before proceedings to help explain concerns social services may have and attend at the PLO Meeting with you.
Contact us or call us on 0114 2496666 to book your appointment today and we will be happy to assess you and advise you as to your eligibility of legal aid.
How We Can Help
If you are concerned that there is a real and imminent risk that your child may be removed unlawfully from the UK, we can take a number of steps:
- Application for a Prohibited Steps order, Residence order, Specific Issue order and/or Parental Responsibility order, preventing the removal of the child from the UK and the possible surrender of the child’s passport
- Placing restrictions on contact or travel
- Alerting the Passport Agency and Embassy to prevent the issuing of new passports or visas
- Alerting ports, airports and border agents and circulating a picture and details of the child at risk
Where abduction is already suspected we can respond appropriately according to the circumstances:
- If your child has been taken to a country within the European Union, a country that has signed up to the Hague Convention or that has entered into an agreement with the UK, we can liaise with the appropriate organisations including the International Child Abduction and Contact Unit to seek that your child is returned.
- If your child has been taken to a country where no such legislative safeguards exist, we can make an application for an order for Wardship. We can then seek various orders to try to locate your child and secure your child’s return, such as the High Court Tipstaff being appointed, foreign Embassies being invited to assist, an order for passports to be seized on re-entry to the country, freezing of assets, declarations of habitual residence and wrongful removal etc.
Contact us or call us on 0114 2496666 to book your appointment today.