Scottish Human Rights Law Group

The unmarried fathers of two children of the same mother objected to the petition of the local authority to have the two boys freed for adoption.   It was likely that the boys would be adopted by their foster carers with whom they were well settled.   One boy regularly saw his birth father, who suffered from mental illness, and wished to remain in contact with him.  The other father was said to have persistently failed without reasonable cause to maintain personal relations and contact with his natural son.   In upholding the decision of the sheriff that the fathers had unreasonably withheld their agreement to the freeing order, the court reiterated that the reasonableness of a decision to withhold agreement was to be judged objectively by the standard of a hypothetical parent who had in mind the paramount consideration in section 6 of the Children (Scotland) Act 1995 which assumed that the parent would recognise that adoption would extinguish all parental rights and leave any future involvement in the hands of the adopters.

Full report available here.

Full report available here.