Nathalie Gettliffe: now for the hard part

The easy part, for me, of the Nathalie Gettliffe case is over.

Canadian penal hawks plainly disagree, but the case for bail pending trial, for an apparently unwell woman going through a difficult pregnancy, struck me as overwhelming. It certainly should not have been denied with what sounded a little like a sentencing speech.

On the question of guilt or innocence, I was less sure. With whatever disclaimers, Nathalie has now entered guilty pleas to abducting two of her own children.

But my views on bail were clear and strong, and I make no apology for expressing them.

I do not doubt that once they got their nurses' industrial action, and a few hostile fellow prisoners, out of the way, the British Columbian prison authorities did their best to care for mother and baby.

Yet if Canada is civilised enough to have a well run prison service, it should also be sophisticated and resourceful enough to come up with an alternative to childbirth behind bars and, for that matter, to all unnecessary incarceration.

Civilised courts should have a predisposition to grant bail - and yes, all the more so in the case of a heavily pregnant woman - unless powerful reasons exist to justify a harsher course. I fully recognise that such reasons occur often enough.

But quite where Nathalie was going to run to, let alone how in her condition, remains a mystery to me. And in what way her conditional freedom would have negated the rights of the father of two of her four children, Scott Grant, has yet to be explained convincingly by his champions here.

No one can tell me that the Canadians do not have the ability to devise terms and conditions to ensure that a defendant stands trial. There is always the stiff sanction of withdrawing bail if, for example, an attempt is made to interfere with witnesses.

And that is why I have regarded Nathalie's continued detention for seven months as a punishment applied by an indignant court.

It outrages me that she is still in custody and while I know little about the sentencing culture of British Columbia, the conduct of its courts in this matter so far do not encourage me to bet very far on a merciful outcome.

But that, in any case, is where the hard part comes in. Nathalie has now acknowledged her guilt and I have no idea what the prosecution is going to throw at her.

There may be factors to challenge my provisional view that extenuating circustances would make a minute of further imprisonment grotesquely inappropriate.

I do not for a moment say Nathalie was right to defy a court order and remove the children to France. On her account, there is substantial mitigation; I hope the court will give a fair hearing to the issues surrounding Scott's religious affiliations that, she says, drove her to desperate actions.

It is, as I admitted when first I wrote about it, a tragic case. I am sure that both Scott and Nathalie love their children, and have good parental qualities, and I hope that eventual custody arrangements reflect this.

But I am not yet ready to pay too much heed to the protestations of the Canadian ambassador to France that coverage of the affair in France has led to unjust criticism of his country.