The following is via the Ottawa Sun:

Thirteen Lev Tahor children won’t be sent back to Quebec to be put into foster care, a judge has ruled.

But those who’ve been returned to Canada after fleeing will remain under Ontario child protection while local agencies work with the families.

The children of the runaway Jewish sect from Quebec, who popped up in Chatham in November after Quebec child protection officials began investigating, remain in foster care while Chatham-Kent Children’s Services works with the families.

In a decision released Monday by Superior Court Justice Lynda Templeton, Lev Tahor won its appeal of an Ontario Court ruling to uphold a Quebec order to send the ultra-orthodox children into temporary care in Quebec.

However, Templeton ordered all the children into local child-protection care after the families tried to flee Canada in February.

One family with six children made it to Guatemala.

The rest of the children are in foster homes in Ontario.

The original order from Quebec named 14 children.

One is a teenaged mother of a baby so her name was removed from the list of affected children. She is living at the Chatham settlement where Lev Tahor touched down after fleeing Quebec.

In her decision, Templeton saw no reason to uproot the children and send them away to Quebec, several hundred kilometres from their families.

“These children have already been found to be in need of protection. To create further upheaval and instability in their lives would most surely have disastrous emotional and psychological ramifications for them,” she wrote.

Templeton said she was satisfied “the rehabilitation that may be necessary for the parents in order to achieve reunification of their families” can be done in Chatham.

The lesson to the closed community, she said, is that you can run but you can’t hide in another province from a family court order.

Templeton said she was dismayed by both with the Lev Tahor leaders and Quebec child protection authorities for discussing the case openly in the media.

“It is highly improper for any child welfare agency which acts on behalf of the state to disclose or discuss in the public domain any allegation with respect to any of its clients especially when those allegations concern already highly vulnerable children of the families involved,” she wrote.

(Source: Ottawa Sun)