12-05-2025
Charlie Gard's grieving mother launches legal fight to lift life-long gagging order to keep identities of the doctors in his case secret
Almost eight years after baby Charlie Gard 's death, his mother has launched a legal fight to lift a life-long gagging order keeping the identities of the doctors involved in his case secret.
Connie Yates, 39, hopes to overturn the injunction, which threatens prison for anyone who dares to 'publish or reveal' the names of the Great Ormond Street Hospital clinicians.
Charlie, who suffered from mitochondrial depletion syndrome, died after they blocked his transfer to a US hospital for a pioneering treatment.
'The injunction is so restrictive that it prevents me from making a complaint to the General Medical Council about the clinicians as I would be revealing their identities,' Ms Yates told the Mail.
'I would have to wait for the Supreme Court to finally discharge it before I could do anything.'
The boy's mother, who is supported by the Christian Legal Centre, says the order imposed in 2017 has 'silenced' her for years.
She spoke of feeling guilt at having not reported those involved in Charlie's case, who she feels may have breached GMC standards while giving evidence on behalf of the NHS in the high-profile case.
Its rules state that medical professionals must 'give an objective, unbiased opinion' and that evidence must not be 'misleading'.
Ms Yates and Charlie's father, Chris Gard, had wanted their son to have a pioneering treatment called nucleoside bypass therapy and had raised £1.3million to transfer him to a US hospital that had agreed to take him.
However, doctors said that Charlie's degenerative condition was irreversible, and that his life support should be switched off to allow him to die with dignity.
His parents took their fight to the European Court of Human Rights but made the decision to end the case after an MRI scan revealed he had deteriorated and lost 90 per cent of his muscle mass.
Charlie was taken off life-support and died on July 28, 2017, days before his first birthday.
'Clinicians were able to hide behind anonymity and say that it was in Charlie's 'best interests' to die rather than to pursue specialist treatment which we as parents wanted,' Ms Yates said.
'It is difficult to put into words what it is like... to be silenced and threatened with being criminalised if you speak about the people condemning your child to die.'
Her legal bid follows a Supreme Court ruling last month in the case of two other families - the Abbasis and Haastrups - saying life-long orders in such cases may only be granted in exceptional circumstances to protect an individual based on 'compelling evidence' of 'a real and continuing threat of a serious nature'.
Ms Yates's legal team has written to Great Ormond Street, saying this shows the injunction must be 'discharged immediately'.
