The last weeks of December were a time of deepened celebration of the Incarnation for many Polish families. Rorate Masses, Midnight Mass, Christmas Masses, Advent hymns, pastoral carols, Christmas carols, and strengthening faith as a family. However, what for us is a beautiful tradition and introducing our own children to the world of faith, for left-wing radicals is… “religious extremism.” In many countries, that’s enough for officials to take children away from their parents!
Going to church as a reason for family separation!
A shocking incident occurred in Sweden, where officials took two daughters (ages 10 and 11) from their parents, accusing them of “religious extremism”. The evidence offered to support this absurd accusation was that the parents attended church three times a week. To get their children back, the parents had to file a complaint against Sweden with the European Court of Human Rights.
Thanks to the work of Ordo Iuris lawyers, who cooperated with Beata Szydło’s government in 2015, a statutory “ban on removing children because of poverty” was introduced in Poland years ago. Years of quiet, systematic work in a special committee of the Ministry of Family helped significantly reduce the scale of removing children from homes. Dozens of wins before family courts and cooperation with the European Court of Human Rights solidified the improvement.
However, for the past two years, Donald Tusk’s government has been blindly repeating in Poland the mistakes of the German and Norwegian “child protection” agencies—Jugendamt and Barnevernet. More and more shocking family cases are once again coming to our attorneys. Parents who face the threat of having their children unjustifiably taken away know that they can always count on the support of Ordo Iuris.
3-year-old Lenka spent Christmas at home!
Thanks to the help of Ordo Iuris lawyers, Christmas was spent at home by 3-year-old Lenka from Warsaw, whose 4-month-old baby brother Oskar died 3 days after the siblings were taken from their home and placed in two different facilities.
All of Poland was shaken by this family’s tragedy when, in June 2025, the media published photos and videos from Oskar’s funeral showing Magdalena—his mother—standing in a prison uniform, with hand-and-ankle restraints. The woman could not even wipe away the tears of despair she shed over her little son’s coffin.
Lena and Oskar were taken from their home when Magdalena was sent to prison because she was unable to complete a court-ordered community service, since… she was in late-stage pregnancy and then in the postpartum period. While removing the children’s mother from the home, the police officers refused to allow the siblings to remain in the care of their grandmother, who had been helping the mother care for them.
By intervening in the case, Ordo Iuris attorneys secured the penitentiary commission’s approval for Lena and Oskar’s mother to serve the remainder of her sentence under electronic monitoring. Magdalena was released and, thanks to our help, regained custody of her daughter, who had spent 3 months in foster care. However, we still represent the family in family court proceedings.
In response to the scale of the irregularities that occurred in this case, we have prepared a petition to the Minister of Family, Labor and Social Policy, whose signatories call on Madam Minister to prepare a draft amendment to the law that will lead to a review of the procedures concerning the immediate removal of children—including guaranteeing the family a real right to a defense and giving them a chance to clarify the situation before such a drastic measure is applied.
We bring smiles back to children’s faces.
Our attorneys also successfully intervened in a case, which shows how little it takes for even the best parents to have their children taken away. The reason the children were taken from the home was… that the parents missed the 3-day deadline to prepare the child’s birth record.
The mother very much wanted a home birth, which went without any complications. Because the birth did not take place in a hospital, the parents had to handle the necessary formalities themselves, but neither she nor the father, who is from Belarus, was sufficiently familiar with Polish law. As soon as they realized the obligation to draw up the child’s birth record without delay, they immediately attempted to obtain their son’s birth record from the hospital and to register the child with the Civil Registry Office. However, it turned out that it was too late because the statutory time limit had expired. A month after the birth, the Municipal Family Assistance Center was notified about the case. This led to the forcible removal of the children, who were placed in a family-type children’s home.
As soon as we learned about the incident, we immediately provided the parents with legal assistance through Ordo Iuris attorneys, who ensured that the boy was registered with the Civil Registry Office and proved in family court that the parents take good care of their children and are able to provide them with adequate living conditions. The court, recognizing the merits of our arguments, allowed the siblings to return home.
Last year we also defended a German family raising a 15-year-old boy and an 11-year-old girl, who fled to Poland to escape the German child welfare office. The parents themselves sought help from the Jugendamt during the COVID-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, instead of granting it, German officials initiated court proceedings against them. Even though the inspection found no irregularities, a German court—based on a single, isolated expert opinion—issued a non-final judgment ordering the children to be taken from the home.
The parents, wishing to get some rest with their children before the start of the appeal proceedings, went on vacation to Poland. After crossing the border, they learned from their German lawyer that even before the appellate proceedings began, a German court had ordered that their children be taken away from them. The desperate parents decided to stay in Poland with their children. They found a home and a job in our country. However, the German child welfare office did not leave them alone and demanded that Poland hand over the siblings to Germany. The children were taken from their home and, pending family court proceedings, placed with a Polish foster family. By intervening in the case, Ordo Iuris attorneys secured a court ruling ordering that the children be returned to their parents.
Our intervention also prevented a family from Olsztyn from being separated, whose problems began with a momentary lapse of attention by the mother, who was caring for two girls with developmental disabilities at home. While the woman was playing with the girls in the yard, one of them slipped out of the yard unnoticed through a gap in the gate. A woman walking along the road came across the girl and called the police. Immediately after the phone call, the girl was found by her parents, who waited with her until the police arrived. Although the situation was clear, one of the female police officers filed a motion with the court to review the family situation.
We provided this family with legal assistance. While representing the parents in family court proceedings, we proved that the girls are provided with the best conditions for their psychological, physical, and social development. The parents provide them with appropriate care, and the incident resulted from the girl’s significantly increased activity level. As a result, the court decided to maintain the parents’ full parental authority.
We defended a family who fled to Poland to escape Norway’s Barnevernet
We helped Monika, who, after over a dozen years abroad, had to urgently flee Norway with her two children to escape the sadly notorious Barnevernet, the child welfare agency.
The family was placed by Norwegian officials under the supervision of social services due to their health issues and the fact that the woman was a single mother. By adding to the burdens of a family already severely tried by life, Barnevernet employees and officials kept imposing ever more requirements on the family, causing it to live in constant stress and fear of the Barnevernet’s actions. Norwegian social workers visited the family at home every week. Without the mother’s knowledge, they communicated with the two children by letter and via text messages. They contacted teachers at schools. While at home, they looked in the cabinets and on the shelves. Additionally, Monika, seeing that the methods of working with the children and her family adopted by the Barnevernet are not adequate for the children’s needs and that the measures being taken are worsening their mental health, decided to arrange additional, private psychological care for her daughter Emilia. Although it was clearly motivated by concern for the welfare of children, the Norwegian Commission for Health and Child Care became concerned about this (!) and intensified its efforts. Norwegian officials also reacted negatively to the information that the girls still have Polish citizenship and that Polish passports had been obtained for them.
This turned the family’s life upside down—at its peak, the Barnevernet would conduct hours-long visits to Monika’s home several times a week! Social workers told the girls outright that if their mother did not comply with the requirements imposed by the staff, the children would be removed from her care. They even wrote letters to the girls, stating that they would be separated from their mother!
Monika—seeing that the problems with the Barnevernet were escalating and her daughters’ mental and physical condition was deteriorating—made the decision to return to Poland urgently, where she found a job and a home, and her daughters’ health and well-being improved significantly.
However, the Norwegians didn’t give up. The Barnevernet issued a decision to remove the girls from their mother. Acting through the Polish Ministry of Justice, the Norwegian authorities then initiated proceedings before a Polish court for the return of the children.
Fortunately, the family came under the care of attorneys from Ordo Iuris, who provided Monika with the necessary legal assistance. If not for this, the children could soon have ended up in Norway, because the Polish Ministry of Justice—as in the case of the Klamans—did not stand up for its citizens…
Thanks to our assistance, a court in Wrocław dismissed the proceedings in December, finding that there were no grounds to restrict Monika’s parental rights.
Family separation after an anonymous tip. A 9-year-old girl will stay with her parents!
In December, we also obtained a judgment of the Warsaw district court, finding no grounds to limit the parental authority of the parents of a 9-year-old daughter, who spent the first years of her life in Greece, where her mother is from. 3 years ago, the family moved to Poland, where the girl’s father is from. After the move, the girl began attending a private Catholic school in Warsaw.
Because of the move to a new country, a new school, and the language barrier, the girl struggled to adjust in Poland. At school, she didn’t cause any trouble—she was quiet and withdrawn. She vented the inevitable stress at home, where she would sometimes be loud, yelling and stomping. Furthermore, the conversations in Greek between the girl and her mother were characterized by significantly greater expressiveness, which is characteristic of the cultures of Mediterranean countries. This prompted a neighbor to file an anonymous report with the Social Welfare Center.
As a result, the court initiated proceedings to limit parental rights. Thanks to the involvement of Ordo Iuris attorneys, who filed a number of evidentiary motions and obtained the necessary reports from the school and examination results, the court confirmed that there are no grounds to restrict parental rights.
A child’s developmental disorders are not a reason to remove them from their home.
We also provide legal assistance to parents raising children with Asperger’s syndrome or autism, the symptoms of which—undoubtedly a challenge for parents—are mistakenly interpreted as evidence of allegedly poor parental care.
In early December, we won a case involving an 8-year-old boy on the autism spectrum. The administration of the primary school he attended, unable to cope with the boy’s condition, instead of implementing an effective plan to help the child, filed a petition with the court for a review of the family’s situation. The school baselessly accused the parents of negatively influencing their child’s moral development, who was said to pose a threat to other students and teachers, and proposed placing the child in a youth sociotherapy center or even a psychiatric facility.
By taking on this case, we proved in court that the boy’s difficulties functioning at school did not stem from his delinquency but were the result of his diagnosed autism. During the proceedings, we demonstrated that the boy’s parents had, from the outset, taken appropriate steps to ensure that the child, who exhibits very high intellectual potential, received proper psychiatric and psychological care, as well as adequate support in the form of social skills training and support classes.
The Wrocław District Court accepted Ordo Iuris’s arguments and refused to interfere with the parents’ parental authority. In its reasoning, the court emphasized that the boy’s parents demonstrate commitment and responsibility in responding to their son’s difficulties resulting from neurodevelopmental disorders. In turn, the court found that the school’s behavior toward the child was aimed at “getting rid of the child from the school,” rather than at supporting the child.
In December, we also won a case for a family from Warsaw, which is raising an 11-year-old daughter who has Asperger’s syndrome. Family court proceedings were initiated by the school in response to the child’s increased absenteeism at the school and atypical behaviors (e.g., withdrawal) associated with autism spectrum disorder, which had been diagnosed in the girl.
Representing the girl’s parents, we persuaded the Warsaw District Court to find that there was no basis to restrict the parents’ parental rights over their minor daughter. In deciding the case, the court noted the good care provided by the parents for the child, the change of school to one with smaller class sizes, and the good cooperation with support institutions (the social welfare center, the family assistant, the community therapist, and the psychological and pedagogical counseling center).
Previously, we succeeded in proceedings concerning a 16-year-old boy diagnosed with atypical autism and adjustment difficulties. Angry at his family, the teenager told false stories that he was being subjected to physical and psychological abuse at home by his parents and brother. As a result of his own recklessness, the boy was taken from his home and placed in a children’s home. Soon after, the teenager retracted the allegations and expressed a desire to return home.
The desperate parents sought help from Ordo Iuris. By intervening in the case, we proved during family court proceedings that there had never been any situations in the family that endangered the teenager’s welfare. The court approved the boy’s return home, finding that subjecting the exercise of parental authority to the supervision of a court-appointed probation officer was sufficient to safeguard his best interests.
Adoptive parents wrongfully accused of abuse
We also provided legal assistance to a married couple from Grodzisk Mazowiecki who had adopted an 8-year-old boy. The child, who functions normally on a daily basis and does well at school, nevertheless exhibits a degree of emotional overexcitability typical of children who have gone through difficult early-childhood experiences, which occurred prior to the child’s adoption. During a fit of strong emotion brought on by his flooding the school bathroom, the boy, frightened by the consequences of his behavior, told the teachers that he was being abused at home by his father. He also complained that his parents were not providing him with meals for school, even though in reality he had prepaid lunches at the school at that time.
Even though the child had previously been in similar situations in which—in order to avoid responsibility for his own actions—he tried to accuse others of violence, the school staff, instead of verifying the boy’s allegations, initiated family court proceedings and activated the Blue Cards procedure (a procedure to urgently protect a child from violence at home). This caused the suspension of the adoption proceedings for a second child, in which the minor’s parents are participating. And having siblings was the boy’s big dream…
Intervening in the case, Ordo Iuris attorneys filed lengthy pleadings with the court, including evidentiary motions, demonstrating that there were no grounds whatsoever to restrict parental rights over the adopted son. As a result, at the very first hearing the family courtruled that there were no grounds to restrict parental authority, emphasizing that the probation officers who visited the family found no irregularities in the boy’s care.
The Klaman family is still separated. We are filing a complaint against Sweden with the Court in Strasbourg.
Unfortunately, not all of the families we help spent Christmas together. The Klamans, a Polish married couple whose four daughters were taken away by Swedish officials, are still waiting for them to come home. Unfortunately, the parents contacted our lawyers only after the girls had already been transported to Sweden and placed in 3 different foster families, where they were forbidden to speak their native language.
The situation is particularly difficult today, but we are still not giving up the fight to reunite the children with their parents. On behalf of the Klamans we filed a complaint against Sweden with the European Court of Human Rights. In it, we state that, in this case, the Swedish authorities violated Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right to respect for private and family life, and that it is unacceptable for the Swedish authorities to conceal from parents the children’s whereabouts and to restrict contact between siblings.
We hope to bring about the return of the Klamans’ daughters to their parents. The Strasburg Court has repeatedly emphasized in its case law that, because the removal of children constitutes a very serious interference with family life, such a decision should be properly and duly justified. That did not occur in this case, which gives hope for victory and the children’s return to Poland.
Together, we will help children return home.
We have often heard from parents whose children were taken away by officials without justification that the Ordo Iuris Institute is their last hope of regaining their beloved children. Many such families come to our lawyers after experiencing months of separation. The stories we hear from such parents are exceptionally dramatic. Parents, often with tears in their eyes, complain to us about the gross injustice and officials’ mistakes that led to their family being separated.
From experience, I know that the interference of heartless officials in the lives of loving families is very often such a tremendous shock that, without the help of professional attorneys, parents are unable to navigate the maze of complex regulations. As a result, children lose their family home and drift from one children’s home to another. Interventions by Ordo Iuris attorneys in family court proceedings enable children who long for their parents and are scarred by the trauma of separation to return home to their parents.
With the help of Donors and Friends of Ordo Iuris, we defend families against separation and excessive, disproportionate interference by officials in their family life.
That is why every one of our victories is thanks to the entire Ordo Iuris community, which you can join by supporting us financially.
Advocate Jerzy Kwaśniewski
Source of cover photo: Ordo Iuris
