A judge has taken the unusual step of releasing the name and picture of a child, and of the father who abducted him, after the father was mistakenly freed from prison.
Judge Hayden said he hoped publicity would help in returning Ifedayo Adeyeye (pictured left) to custody, despite the privacy element of the European Convention on Human Rights. He also said there was a public interest in reporting such a failure of the state.
His judgment was in response to an application from Chris Bryden, counsel acting for the child’s mother Claire N’Djosse, whom the judge also allowed to be named. She is seeking the return of her son Laurys (pictured right) from Nigeria, where he was taken after what the judge called “a planned, carefully executed and brutal abduction”.
Adeyeye was released in error from Pentonville prison where he was being detained after repeatedly refusing to comply with orders to return Laurys.
Ifedayo Adedapo Kolawole Adeyeye is being sought in connection with the abduction of his son, Laurys. Pictures courtesy of Champion News
The case spans the legal systems of France, where the mother lives and where Laurys was born in April 2021; Nigeria, where Laurys was taken by dual British-Nigerian national Adeyeye and where a Nigerian court has ordered him to stay with a family said to be Adeyeye’s relatives; and the UK, where Laurys has British nationality via his father.
It also involves, as the judge put it, “a balancing exercise” between Articles 8 and 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The former protects family privacy and the latter free reporting. But, sitting in the Family Division of the High Court, the judge said that although this was often a difficult balance to strike, that was not the case here.
Adeyeye and Ms N’Djosse met in Grenoble, where they separated before Laurys was born. In 2023 a French court awarded Ms N’Djosse sole custody but said Adeyeye should have contact. In July 2024 Laurys spent his first night with Adeyeye, but he did not return. Instead Adeyeye took him via England to Nigeria.
The court took the unusual step of permitting the names and images of father and child to be placed in the public domain. Pictures courtesy of Champion News
French authorities issued an international arrest warrant, and Adeyeye was detained in the UK in December 2024. Laurys remained in Nigeria, subject to guardianship orders that Judge Hayden said were based on “false and probably fraudulent information indicating that both parents had consented”.
But, the judge said, “Nigeria is not a signatory to the 1980 Hague Convention on International Child Abduction, and there is no treaty-based mechanism for securing Laurys’s return to France”.
After Adeyeye’s’ arrest, the UK courts granted Location and Return Orders to London or Paris. Adeyeye’s bid to appeal against these was refused, and in November last year he was found in contempt of court for being in breach of the orders and sentenced to six months in prison. During this time he was found to be in further breach and sentenced to another 12 months, only to be mistakenly released.
In an email dated two days after the release, Pentonville prison apologised for their error and said they “will be contacting the police”. The judge said this indicated nothing had yet been done and that the email generally displayed “an alarming lack of urgency”.
Judge Hayden said the release had devastated Ms N’Djosse as Adeyeye’s detention was “the best, perhaps only, hope for the reunification of this boy with his mother”.
The abduction was, the judge said, “at the very top end of the index of gravity. In the Criminal Courts of England and Wales, it would attract a lengthy prison sentence.”
He said Ms N’Djosse’s pain was “visceral and unbearable to watch”. Laurys was a child who “had never spent a night away from her before and whom she has not seen since”, and who must have been “terrified, missing his home, his mother, his friends, his entire world”.
The judge concluded by saying he would be sending a copy of his judgment directly to the governor of HMP Pentonville to be passed immediately to the chief constable of the Metropolitan Police.
