Judge who is now the biter bit

Acurious tale has reached me from India where, for the first time ever, a high court judge has been jailed for six months for “contempt of court”. Even before I read on, to discover the even more astonishing nature of his offence, I was already intrigued, because in all my years covering our own family courts, I have been struck by how its judges regard “contempt” as the gravest possible offence, and how arbitrarily they can use it to send people to prison.

I need only recall the shocking examples, among many, of two grandmothers in their 70s, Kathleen Danby and Teresa Kirk, each sentenced to six months. For Mrs Danby, this was for having embraced her desperately unhappy granddaughter, who had escaped from a foster home to meet her in a pub car park. For Mrs Kirk, it was for refusing to sign a letter dictated by the judge, which she regarded as “wholly improper” and “dishonest”: trying to get her to authorise the forcible return to Britain of her 81-year-old brother, whom she had legally placed in a superb care home in his native Portugal.

In 2006, Harriet Harman revealed in Parliament that, the previous year, family court judges had jailed 200 women for contempt; and although we have no later figures, evidence suggests that little has changed.

But now comes the amazing twist to that Indian case, where Calcutta high court judge CSKarnan was sentenced to six months by India’s supreme court (although it seems he has gone on the run). His “contempt”, it turns out, was to have publicly named 20 fellow judges whom he had accused of “corruption”. We can see how, in a judge’s eyes, there could be no graver offence than that.