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AYLMER SOCIAL WORKERS VIOLATED CHARTER RIGHTS, LAWYER ARGUES

ST. THOMAS, Ont., July 5, 2002 (LSN.ca) - The legal strategy of the parents' lawyers in the Aylmer child abduction case is becoming clear after the trial judge's publication ban was lifted last week by a more senior court. The mother's lawyer, Valerie Wise, is not aguing the case on religious freedom grounds or the right of parents to spank. Instead, she has argued that social workers and police violated the parents' Charter rights by entering their home and abducting their seven children without warrant -- and that all their evidence is therefore inadmissible.

Family and Children's Services of St. Thomas and Elgin County, led by Shelley West, an inexperienced recent graduate with a B.A. in psychology, who with the aid of Andre Reymer, Aylmer's deputy police chief, seized the children on July 4, 2001 and held them for 22 days.

"It was not necessary to apprehend the children from the house on July 4," Wise told Madam Justice Eleanor Schnall, "let alone to apprehend them as forcefully as they were apprehended," she said. "It was both unlawful and unconstitutional to take them without a warrant."

Lawyer Wise noted that Ms. West reopened the Aylmer file even though it had been officially closed by a more senior social worker. The rookie therefore had no legal reason to interfere with the family, a move Wise described as "a complete fishing expedition" rooted in her own presuppositions about the traditionalist Church of God. "Guilt by association is wrong and dangerous," Wise said. "That's a scary proposition in a free society where we enjoy freedom of association and freedom of religion" -- freedoms that obviously have some bearing on the case.

To read coverage in the Toronto Star see: http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_T...

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