Fathers4Justice campaigner found guilty of defacing Queen portrait with purple paint while it was hanging in Westminster Abbey

• Tim Haries, 42, climbed over a cordon and wrote ‘help’ on £160,000 painting
• Told steward who tackled him: ‘Sorry, mate, I’ve nothing against the Queen’
• Haries, of Doncaster, said he had wanted to highlight ‘social justice issue’
• Father of two had denied causing criminal damage to Ralph Heimans’ work
  
• Today he was convicted of the charge by a jury at Southwark Crown Court
• Recorder of Westminster said direct action could not be used as a defence
• Haries will be sentenced on 5 February
  

Fathers4Justice campaigner Tim Haries, 42, was found guilty of causing criminal damage by a jury at Southwark Crown Court today

A Fathers4Justice campaigner who sprayed the word ‘help’ onto a portrait of the Queen as it hung in Westminster Abbey was found guilty of criminal damage today.

Tim Haries, 42, shouted ‘Fathers for justice’ as he defaced the Ralph Heimans painting before telling an Abbey steward who tackled him to the ground: ‘Sorry mate, I’ve got nothing against the Queen’, Southwark Crown Court was told.

Despite telling a police officer arresting him that he was ‘guilty as charged’, the father of two had denied a charge of causing criminal damage of more than £5,000.

Haries, who told jurors he wanted to highlight the ‘social justice issue of our time’, smuggled a can of purple spray paint into the Abbey on June 13 last year, before scrawling the word ‘help’ on the £160,000 painting.

Prosecutor Allister Walker said Haries was tackled to the ground by steward Peter Crook after defacing the large oil painting.

Photographs of the incident were later posted on a Fathers4Justice Facebook page.

Haries told officers who arrived at the scene ‘It’s for Fathers4Justice’, and when asked if it was he who had sprayed the painting, he replied ‘Guilty as charged’, the court was told.

Today jurors were addressed by Haries, who told them he had now decided to represent himself and said he carried out the act as a protest against the ‘social catastrophe’ of fathers not being allowed access to their children.

‘The pain of losing my children has been like a living bereavement for me,’ he said.

‘I believe that contact denial is a hate crime and an abuse of children’s fundamental rights.’

But Judge Alistair McCreath, Recorder of Westminster, told the jury that direct action or civil disobedience could not be used as a defence in law.

Haries was told he could leave the dock and sit at the back of the court room when representing himself.

But, after being found guilty, he said he wanted to reappoint his defence barrister Kyriakos Argyropoulos.

Judge McCreath told him: ‘You can’t just duck and dive and have counsel and not have counsel.’

But Mr Argyropoulos said he consented to represent him again, before the judge said he would adjourn for a month for pre-sentencing reports to be carried out.

Haries, of Doncaster, South Yorkshire, was given conditional bail to return to the court for sentencing on 5 February, but the judge told him this was not an indication of how he would be dealt with.

The £160,000 oil painting by artist Ralph Heimans before, left, and after it was defaced by the father of two

 

Haries later released a statement through Fathers4Justice in which he said his ‘children’s lives are worth more than any painting’.

‘Whilst I disagree with the verdict reached by the jury, I take full responsibility for my actions,’ he said.

‘Every Family Court judge who separates fathers from their children does so with the authority of the Queen.’

He said that he defaced the painting a day after his ‘desperation at not seeing my children was further heightened’ when a shared parenting debate in Parliament was attended by just four MPs.

‘As a result of this disgraceful attendance and the obvious contempt MPs have for the children and families ripped apart in secret courts, I felt compelled to act,’ he added.

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John Hemming: We must change the way family courts are run

Birmingham MP says a lot of human misery is being caused by the UK’s family law

by John Hemming

Family law, particularly when it involves more than one country, is a complex issue involving a number of very sensitive issues. However, the machinery has been hidden away and is only now partially coming to the surface.

The story of the woman who was sectioned on a visit to Essex, subjected to a forced caesarean and then had her baby put up for adoption had a lot of publicity last year. As a result of this we can see some of the detail behind this.

I always think it is a good idea to look at things from the perspective of the children. Her baby daughter is now one. She has two sisters. Families are important to people and sibling relationships are important to children and adults.

When she gets to be a teenager she will find out more about what has happened in her life. Her question will be why was she not brought up with her sisters?

If she meets her sisters she will find they are fluent in a language she cannot speak and she won’t know anyone in her wider family.

It is true that the grandmother does not feel she can deal with all three children.

However, the aunt of the baby’s step-sister offered to look after the two sisters and the baby in the same household.

Essex County Council, however, refused this. Their argument was that the aunt was not a blood relative of the baby. That is a silly argument.

I know, however, that Essex have an adoption target. In their corporate plan of 2012/3 it was 12 per cent of the children in care and they were below target. Previously they were paid £2,469,200 by the Blair government for increasing adoptions.

Hence when it comes to the care plan it is clear that the local authority employees are under a lot of pressure to propose a care plan for adoption.

It is in fact only the younger children that can be adopted. Nationally a very high proportion of the children that leave care under five do so through adoption.

So we are saying to that baby in 12 years time that she was kept away from her family for no good reason and that the local authority had a bureaucratic target to divide families.

My view is that this target lies behind the decision to refuse to allow the aunt to care for the children.

Many foreign governments have complained about what is done in the English family courts.

However, they are not properly subject to scrutiny in England.

Successive governments have been pressing for children to be taken into care earlier and then adopted quickly. Not only does this lead to more miscarriages of justice, but it also makes it harder to protect children from harm.

It is nigh on impossible to predict that a child will starve to death at the age of seven when that child is born. The low threshold for intervention with babies also drives a higher threshold for intervention for older children.

When I say “the wrong children are taken into care”, I mean both that children are taken into care who shouldn’t be, but also that older children are abandoned by the system and end up dying from child abuse and neglect when they need not.

There is very little scrutiny of how the system operates. It does not actually require people to be identified to have more scrutiny.

We also should not imprison people whose only offence is complaining about problems with the system.

I proposed a system of academic scrutiny of family proceedings, but the children’s services directors rejected this.

I could write a lot more about this. I believe a lot of human misery is being created unnecessarily.

We need a change in approach urgently.

John Hemming is Liberal Democrat MP for Birmingham Yardley