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Should extended family members have similar rights to parents?

Everyone knows that children’s rights to have a relationship with both of their parents is enshrined in law. Indeed, the only circumstances under which a judge would deny one parent contact with their child would be because doing so was likely to adversely affect the child’s wellbeing.

Indeed, even such concerns often lead judges to instead offer applicants wishing to spend time with their children supervised contact initially, often in the hope that this will lead to unsupervised contact, overnight stays etc. For Grandparents, uncles, aunties and other relatives, though, it’s not so simple.

Should anyone other than a child’s mother or father wish to request that a court grant them a contact or residency order, then they must first request the court’s permission before their application is even considered. Most people would, I believe, agree with claims that denying a grandparent contact with their grandchild is just as heinous as preventing a mother or father from seeing their child. Additionally, I think most of us would agree that regular contact with grandparents is in a child’s best interests. Take these factors into consideration and it’s clear why a child’s right to see their grandparents, and the possibility of this being enshrined in law, is being so widely debated at the moment.

This particular issue was discussed in parliament just last week and, if reports are to be believed, a change to existing law has cross-party support. That said, no politician or political party is going to do anything other than support such a matter at these early stages when there’s little at stake. Should MPs be asked to vote on the matter, this may well change. The fact that the UK’s family courts are near breaking point is now common knowledge and opening them up to a potentially large number of additional matters is only going to make this worse.

Still, it cannot be denied that, morally speaking and provided there’s no good reason for contact not to be exercised, any new or amended law that helped estranged grandparents see their grandchildren would be an overwhelmingly good thing; particularly as the vast majority of applications would be resolved before it became necessary for a judge to rule on them.

The key question here is actually the extent to which it would be practicable to open these applications. It’s quite reasonable to say that grandparents should be allowed to make such an application but should this also apply to uncles, aunties, siblings, cousins etc.? Let us know your thoughts by leaving a comment below.

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