{"id":10745,"date":"2017-06-20T17:01:59","date_gmt":"2017-06-20T16:01:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.christianvoice.org.uk\/?p=10745"},"modified":"2017-06-22T20:49:55","modified_gmt":"2017-06-22T19:49:55","slug":"medway-contempt-of-court-lukjanenko","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.christianvoice.org.uk\/index.php\/medway-contempt-of-court-lukjanenko\/","title":{"rendered":"Judge finds father in contempt of court again"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Canterbury<\/a>
Canterbury Civil Court heard the case of contempt of court against Eugene Lukjanenko<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A father in dispute with Medway Council narrowly escaped jail for contempt of court in Canterbury County Court last week for the second time in six months.<\/p>\n

Eugene Lukjanenko was charged with five breaches of an order made on 30th September 2015. The Order prohibited him from naming employees or ex-employees of the Council online.<\/p>\n

To his credit, said Judge Richard Scarratt, he freely admitted the breaches. But His Honour rejected Mr Lukjanenko’s argument that his conduct was reasonable. Judge Scarratt sentenced him to 56 days in prison, suspended for a year.<\/p>\n

The judge said: \u2018The local authority may feel that is soft’. Nevertheless, His Honour had taken into account that if he imposed an immediate custodial term, Mr Lukjanenko \u2018will be a martyr to his cause, a cause which in my judgment has no substance whatever’.<\/p>\n

Previous contempt of court sentence \u2018stemmed the flow’<\/h2>\n

In January, the same judge imposed the same sentence on the same defendant for naming his son online in breach of a High Court Reporting Restrictions Order. But yesterday, he said that had \u2018stemmed the flow’ of the prohibited information. He said he hoped the same would happen this time.<\/p>\n

\"His<\/a>
His Honour Judge Richard Scarratt<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Order, made in the family court, forbad Eugene Lukjanenko from displaying the Names, Contact Details or photographs of any Medway Council employee any where.<\/p>\n

How such an obvious infringement of his Article 10 right to Freedom of Expression came to be made was never explained at the hearing. The judge was solely concerned with Medway’s heavy-handed application to commit Mr Lukjanenko to prison.<\/p>\n

Moreover,\u00a0we are going to commend Judge Scarratt for his patience. He was dealing with an understandably upset father. The father’s first language is Russian. He continually wanted to raise what he sees as previous unjust treatment in the family courts and by Medway. \u00a0He may have a point. \u00a0There is little evidence the Council tried to keep this family together. And that is what we all think social workers should be doing, except in the most extreme cases of abuse or neglect.<\/p>\n

Did he breach the Order?<\/h2>\n

The Crown Prosecution Service looked at the case under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 and decided there was no case. That should raise a question\u00a0about double jeopardy. In a convoluted bit of reasoning, barrister Edward Elliott, appearing for the Council, submitted that the CPS only considered one aspect of the case. Moreover, since they took no action, there was no double jeopardy in any case. This court could try the case, a point which Judge Scarratt was happy to accept.<\/p>\n

Mr Elliott said: \u2018This is not the criminal court’. So it was not about whether the conduct actually amounted to harassment. All the mattered was \u2018did he breach the order?’<\/p>\n

And of that there was little doubt. Mr Lukjanenko put the names of three social workers with their contact details (where those were in the pubic domain) on his Facebook timeline quite a while ago.<\/p>\n

No compromise<\/h2>\n
\"The<\/a>
The defendant before a similar case in January. Face obscured<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The court heard that over the lunch break Mr Lukjanenko discussed the possibility of a compromise with Medway. This fell down when the Council refused to increase contact with his son. Nor would they bring forward a meeting scheduled for September to reconsider the frequency of contact. \u00a0That seems mean-minded.<\/p>\n

But the judge said the two issues, contact and the breaches of the order, could not be linked. Judge Scarratt actually heard the case in the family court. But this was not now the family court, he said. This was a civil court hearing for contempt of court in public.<\/p>\n

However, in an extraordinary development, the court heard that Mr Lukjanenko produced a letter in the interval.<\/p>\n

In the letter, signed by his son, the son said he wanted to come home. Mr Lukjanenko drafted it and gave it to his son to read and sign in his last meeting at the local authority contact centre. Although these were not family court proceedings, the judge was aghast. \u2018Was not the contact supervised? How did that happen?’ he demanded.<\/p>\n

Contact centres are intended to be heavily policed by social workers. Parents are not even supposed to tell their children they love them or that they are fighting to get them home. They may certainly not pass pieces of paper to them.<\/p>\n

Reporting Restrictions<\/h2>\n

At the end of the hearing, this author drew Judge Scarratt’s attention to a Reporting Restrictions Order in the family court which forbids the media from naming the father or the son in any report on the case. However, ours is not a jurisdiction that quietly locks people up. If someone faces prison, the hearing must be advertised and the person named. Court Practice Direction, CCR (County Court Rules) 29 on Committal Applications applies. Rule 29.9 says:<\/p>\n

9. A committal application should normally be heard in public (see CPR rule 39.2), but if it is heard in private and the court finds the respondent guilty of contempt of court, the judge shall, when next sitting in public, state \u2013
\n(1) the name of the respondent;
\n(2) in general terms the nature of the contempt or contempts found proved; and
\n(3) the penalty (if any) imposed.<\/p>\n

\"Edward<\/a>
Edward Elliott is involved in another contempt of court case brought by Medway Council<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Judge Scarratt had to comply with the end of rule 29.9 as he was already sitting in open court. His Honour accordingly ruled we could identify the father by his full name. We are actually reluctant to do so, but the interests of justice require it. The onus is on a local authority pursuing a parent to prison to be aware they are enabling the identification of parents. They normally strive very hard to avoid that. We can only hope this does not lead to identification of the child in the case.<\/p>\n

Medway Council pursuing another parent<\/h2>\n

Eugene Lukjanenko is not the only parent Medway Council are pursuing. We understand they are after a mother, who at the moment we shall refer to as SR. SR has published details about her case on social media. She sees a miscarriage of justice towards her and her children who are now, as we understand it, of majority age anyway.<\/p>\n

Curiously, Edward Elliott, Medway’s barrister, boasts on his chambers page<\/a><\/strong> about his involvement in committal proceedings against SR\u00a0for contempt of court. The mother’s case will be heard in July and we shall be there, God willing, to report on the case.<\/p>\n

Previous posts:<\/h2>\n

Family Court Restrictions: father ‘in contempt’<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Father fighting Medway Council faces jail for contempt<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Click on the links below to share this story:<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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A father in dispute with Medway Council narrowly escaped jail for contempt of court in Canterbury County Court last week for the second time in six months. Eugene Lukjanenko was charged with five breaches of an order made on 30th September 2015. The Order prohibited him from naming employees or ex-employees of the Council online. 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Policing & Crime<\/a> Social Services & Child Abduction<\/a> UK Christian Constitution<\/a>","rttpg_excerpt":"A father in dispute with Medway Council narrowly escaped jail for contempt of court in Canterbury County Court last week for the second time in six months. Eugene Lukjanenko was charged with five breaches of an order made on 30th September 2015. The Order prohibited him from naming employees or ex-employees of the Council online.…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.christianvoice.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.christianvoice.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.christianvoice.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.christianvoice.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.christianvoice.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.christianvoice.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10745\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.christianvoice.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.christianvoice.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.christianvoice.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.christianvoice.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}