Mother wins right to stay in UK to see the baby girl she stabbed: Bangladeshi woman uses human rights laws to stay after she served five year jail term



Woman was jailed for five years for attempted murder with kitchen knife



She said of her unhappy marriage: 'If I can’t have [the baby] no-one will'



But tribunal ruled deporting her to Bangladesh would be disproportionate

She moved to Tower Hamlets, east London, in 2007 after marrying cousin



A mother who stabbed her baby daughter with a kitchen knife has won the right to stay in Britain – so she can stay in touch with the girl she tried to kill.

The woman was jailed for five years for attempting to murder her daughter when the girl was just eight months old.

After completing her jail sentence she was due to be deported to her home country of Bangladesh.

'An appallingly difficult case': A tribunal has ruled that a woman who stabbed her baby girl with a kitchen knife will not be deported because that would separate her from her child (photo posed by models)

But the family courts gave her the right to see her daughter under tight supervision for an hour three times a year – and she has now won the right to stay in Britain permanently.

A judge ruled it would be ‘very cruel’ to stop her from seeing the child.

She won her case using Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights – the right to a private and family life.

Controversial: The decision was made by Mr Justice Mostyn

When the Home Office appealed, another judge described the earlier ruling as ‘generous’ but refused to overturn it.

The woman – who cannot be named because it would identify the child, came to Britain in September 2007 after marrying her cousin in an arranged ceremony the year before.

Despite speaking no English and having never been to Britain before, she moved to be with him in a maisonette in Tower Hamlets, East London. Their daughter was born in June 2008.

The marriage was unhappy and in March 2009 the 30-year-old’s husband presented her with a one-way ticket for her to return to Bangladesh. He also obtained a court order banning her from taking the child out of the country.

The mother told relatives she would kill the baby and kill herself rather than be separated from her daughter, saying: ‘If I can’t have her then no-one will.’

Her husband left her alone with the child and returned to find her stabbing the girl in the stomach.

He grabbed the child and ran upstairs with her – with the mother chasing after him with the knife – before she was overpowered by his brother.



The Old Bailey heard she left a 1.6in stab wound and the baby would have died if the thrust had not caught one of her ribs.

Afterwards the woman asked her husband: ‘Why couldn’t you come in later? Then I could have finished her off?’, the court heard.



The sentencing judge accepted the ticket and the court injunction ‘came out of the blue and it was a cruel act which left her no room to take advice about her situation’. He also accepted that she was in an ‘overpowering situation’ and was facing ‘huge emotional turmoil’ – so jailed her for just five years.

In July 2011, while still behind bars, she was granted access to her daughter, by then nearly three years old, by the Family Courts.



Migration: The woman had moved from Bangladesh to Tower Hamlets in east London, pictured

That ruling was made by Mr Justice Mostyn, the same judge who, sitting in the Court of Protection, allowed doctors to sedate a pregnant woman to perform a caesarean without her consent.

The child was then a ward of the court – and her mother was allowed to see her three times a year for one hour under strict supervision.

He wrote that it was ‘positively in the interests of this little girl for her to see her mother’.

He wrote: ‘From these small beginnings, it may well be that, as time progresses, something more meaningful can be built up, although that will inevitably be a difficult progress given the nature of the crime which was committed by the mother.’

When the mother was released from prison in December 2011 she was informed by the Home Office that she faced deportation because of the horrific attack.



A tribunal ruled in her favour in March 2013 on the basis of Article 8, saying removal from Britain would ‘not be proportionate’.

Judge Christopher Buckwell said it would be a ‘very cruel decision indeed’ for both the mother and her daughter to ‘effectively end contact’ between them.

The tribunal concluded: ‘It is entirely appreciated that it is on a very limited basis at the present time but in our view it is overwhelmingly significant that contact has been permitted and endorsed by the courts.’

The Home Office appealed – saying it was in the public interest to deport her.

Shock: The woman was jailed for five years at the Old Bailey (pictured) but then allowed to see her child in prison

Before the Upper Tribunal, lawyers for the Home Secretary argued that the mother had ‘damaged her daughter emotionally and psychologically and further contact would cause her daughter harm’.



They said the child, who is now four and a half, ‘does not even fully recognise who she is’ and has only seen her mother on seven occasions since 2010.

And they said the daughter ‘may not even want to know her when she is older and knows what has happened’ and that further contact would cause her daughter further harm.

But Upper Tribunal Judge Deborah Taylor, while admitting the decision of the lower court was ‘generous’, refused to overturn its ruling in what she described as an ‘appallingly difficult case’.

A Home Office spokesman said: ‘We are disappointed and surprised with this verdict and we have applied to the Court of Appeal for the right to challenge it.

‘Those who come to the UK must abide by our laws. We will take all necessary steps to deport foreign criminals and have introduced tough new rules to protect the public from those who try to stay here through abuse of the Human Rights Act.