Two high-profile cases concerning the approach of public authorities towards religion and identity, where the care and future of looked after children were concerned, have featured this summer.
Firstly, a Sikh couple were denied the opportunity to adopt a white baby by Adopt Berkshire, the Windsor and Maidenhead council-run adoption agency, and despite considerable political pressure and the intervention of the EHRC, the local authority refused to alter its position, stating only that it could not discuss individual cases. Some weeks later, The Times broke a story concerning a five-year-old girl of Christian heritage, fostered by a conservative Muslim family. The newspaper reports claimed that the child was denied her favourite meal as it contained bacon, had her cross taken from her and was subjected to comments denigrating non-Muslim women and culture. On this occasion, the council robustly hit back, asserting that the media coverage contained serious factual errors and sought to be inflammatory. Furthermore, the judge dealing with related proceedings took the comparatively unusual step of making an anonymised version of the Case Management Order publically available, in order to address some of the spreading misperceptions. In the midst of the media furore, Sir Martin Narey, the Government’s official adviser on fostering, stepped in to comment, and told the Telegraph that ethnicity and religion of foster carers was a secondary issue. He stressed that they did not matter in 2017.
Cite this article as: J García Oliva, ““Why the Constitutional Treatment of Religion in Great Britain Matters in Religious Disputes” in UK Cons L Blog (26th Sept. 2017) (available at https://ukconstitutionallaw.org/))