It has taken over a year of inexplicable delays but at last Portugal’s tortuous legal system seems to be working towards justice in the case of a little girl stolen from her mother for seven agonising months.
Giselle (Ellie) Silva’s high-profile kidnapping by her father, Vilamoura businessman Filipe Silva, received endless column inches two years ago – but even after police found the child and restored her to the custody of her Irish mother, Silva was left living life a free man.
This is in stark contrast to what happened only last month to the father and grandmother of another kidnapped child.
Paulo Guiomar and his elderly mother have both been jailed pending the trial into the two-year kidnapping of Guiomar’s daughter Maria Alice.
As Ellie’s mother Candice told the Resident it looks, at long last, like the authorities have woken up to the real horror of what parental kidnapping means.
In the case of nine-year-old victim Maria Alice, two years of brainwashing are being delicately unscrambled. The child’s mother Carla Evangelista has appealed for understanding as the family grapples with recovering the carefree little girl that was snatched from them in the summer of 2012 and made to live in an attic in Belgium, deprived of friends or proper schooling and kept with her formerly long hair tightly cropped.
In Ellie’s case, brainwashing had less time to work. She is now back in the fold of her fun-loving family in Ireland – “going to a super school and just being a happy, nine-year-old, enjoying life with her younger sister and baby brothers”.
After six years of agony at the hands of Faro family court, the Gannon family have been informed that Ellie is no longer under the court’s jurisdiction.
“It’s just great news”, stepfather Philip told us yesterday.
“The same week we got this information, we heard that the superior council of magistrates investigating the Faro instructional judge in the criminal case for kidnapping has ensured that this trial will now take place – without any further delays”.
As he explained, it looks like all the months of legal battling and psychological agony are paying off.
Gannon got his step-daughter out of Portugal last summer within hours of an extremely biased documentary being aired on prime-time television. The 14-minute feature ended with the words of a Portuguese psychologist saying:“impossible as it is to believe there are still courts in Portugal that do not attend to the higher interests of the child”.
The film’s plan, Gannon told us, had been to generate pressure to change the terms of Ellie’s custody arrangements.
“I would not have rated my chances of getting out with Ellie after the propaganda campaign was aired”, he added.
Anyone who saw the programme and knew the story of Ellie’s ordeal would have been shocked by the programme’s level of bias. Not once in the emotive report on the case of a child snatched from her loving father did it mention that the father was actually awaiting trial for the child’s kidnapping.
Needless to say, the Gannons instigated legal proceedings over the programme, but ever since, justice has been dragging its feet.
Now at last there seems to be light at the end of the tunnel. Indeed, news this morning is that the lawyer representing Filipe Silva is also to be investigated by the Lawyers association ethics committee.
