Child abductor wrongly freed
Prison apologises for not ‘flagging up’ High Court order to staff
Staff at Pentonville prison in London wrongly failed to detain a man who had carried out a “brutal abduction of a young boy from his mother”, the High Court said on Friday.
Mr Justice Hayden added that keeping Ifedayo Adedapo Kolawole Adeyeye in custody had been “the best, perhaps only, hope for the reunification of this boy with his mother”. Claire Mireille N’Djosse, a refugee from Cameroon who lives in France, was said by the judge to be “devastated” by the prison’s admitted error.
Unusually, Hayden allowed the five-year-old, Laurys, to be named and his photograph to be published. In an unprecedented move, he had ordered the boy to be returned to his mother under the court’s inherent parens patriae jurisdiction — even though Laurys was not thought to be in England.
His parents’ relationship had lasted for eight months. Adeyeye, an engineer, never lived with N’Djosse and they separated before Laurys was born in April 2021, in France.
The French courts allowed Adeyeye contact with his son. In July 2024 Adeyeye, a dual British–Nigerian national, was allowed for the first time to have Laurys stay with him overnight. Having obtained passports, he immediately took his son to England and then to Nigeria. Later that year, Adeyeye was arrested on a visit to the UK.
Hayden said:
Laurys remained in Nigeria, where guardianship orders were made by a Nigerian court in favour of a Nigerian family said to be Adeyeye’s relatives. I have no idea if they in fact are.
As will be evident from the chronology, I can place very little reliance on anything that Adeyeye says. He has been entirely dishonest throughout. The orders were based on false and probably fraudulent information indicating that both parents had consented. The mother had no notice of, and no involvement in, those proceedings.
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.
Last November, Mrs Justice Judd found Adeyeye in contempt of court for failing to arrange for his son’s return to France. The father was subsequently sentenced to six months in prison, to expire on 21 April.
On 20 April, a deputy High Court judge found that Adeyeye had taken no steps to have the boy returned to his mother and sentenced him to a further 12 months in prison. A warrant of committal was sent to the prison later the same day.
On 23 April, a prison officer emailed N’Djosse’s solicitors. The prison said:
We have released Mr Adeyeye in error. We didn’t receive the 12 month warrant until late on Mon 20th (18:05) and it was not flagged up before he was released on morning of 21st April for the 6 month sentence we had been holding him on.
I will be contacting the police for them to apprehend him and return to custody. He is currently unlawfully at large.
I will keep you updated as I get updates. We apologise for this error.
Noting that the email had been sent two days after the release, Hayden said it appeared that nothing had been done by that stage and that there was “an alarming lack of urgency in the tone of the email generally”.
He hoped that publicity would help secure Adeyeye’s return to custody. “When the state fails in the way that it has done here,” the judge added, “there is a public interest in that being put in the public domain too and in transparent terms.”
Another appalling blunder by the prison authorities with a disturbing lack of urgency shown when the error was identified.
Very easy to lambast the prison but perhaps an oversimplification. So much reliance is now placed on remote systems as opposed to personal dealings that proactivity handling is forgotten. There may be a reason for his absence but one would have expected the individual to have been at court if being sentenced to further imprisonment. The information and warrant cold have accompanied him back to prison. If he wasn't, then one would have expected those involved - both court and legal practitioners - to have been proactive in flagging up the further sentence rather than bunging it on a fax machine after most offices have closed. Not doing so suggests a remarkable lack of insight into the realities of the workings of the prison system. I cannot think of an organisation, whether private or public sector, where every incoming sheet of paper is picked up and acted on instantly.
Of course the prison should have acted more swiftly when discovering its mistake but prevention is better than cure.