71 year old Teresa Kirk – the Portuguese grandmother jailed in UK for refusing to sign her 81-year-old brother over to the care of social services – has at last been freed, following an appeal bid by her lawyer Colin Challenger, and a great deal of pressure behind the scenes.
Mr Challenger faced various hurdles trying to lodge the appeal (click here) but yesterday the head of the family court Sir James Munby agreed that the system had failed Mrs Kirk, and that he had ‘real concerns’ and a ‘sense of unease’ over the case, which in UK cannot be truly explained due to reporting restrictions.
As Resident readers were made aware at the outset, Teresa Kirk has Power of Attorney over her Alzheimer-sufferer brother Manuel Martin’s affairs, and the fact that she was jailed for deciding to put him in a Tavira care home, and not an English one, should have been ‘up to her’, and not an issue over which she could face any kind of prosecution.
As it was, Mrs Kirk’s case came under the ambit of Britain’s so-called ‘secret courts’, and if it had not been for the Dail Mail newspaper, details of it might never have surfaced.
For now, the 71-year-old is “back home with her daughter and grandchildren” and the ‘main appeal’ is unlikely to be heard before “sometime early next year”.
“There is still a long way to go”, Mrs Kirk’s former husband told us on Tuesday evening. “But this is a good result. It also means that for the time being Manuel is safe from UK interference”.
PHOTO: Safe in his Tavira care home, Manuel in the foreground, with his sister right behind him
