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In the Czech Republic, 6% of all children under three are institutionalised (the highest proportion in Europe, higher than central Asia). Across Europe there are estimated to be 23,000 children under three in residential institutions variously called “care homes”, “placement centres” or — the Western press’s favourite, because it fits neatly into headlines — “orphanages”. Yet only 6% of the children currently living in these institutions are actually parentless. Vasek Knotek’s parents live less than a mile away from the care home where he is caged.

The letters I fired off in all directions back in June 2004 had one swift result. After I bombarded Scottish MEPs, the Czech ambassador to Britain, the Czech prime minister and president and as many other people as I thought might have some clout in the matter of cage beds, it was announced that the (then) Czech health minister had sent a letter to hospital directors asking them to end cage bed use by the end of 2004.

A few British newspapers reported that my letters had brought about the abolition of cage beds. I knew this was a bad joke. I doubted that a single cage bed had been scrapped, and the Hungarian-based Mental Disability Advocacy Centre (MDAC) agreed. They say that the hundreds of cage beds in the Czech Republic are fully occupied to this day, “used arbitrarily and without any legal regulations”. There was never even a pretence that the use of cage beds in Slovakia, Slovenia and Hungary was not continuing unabated.

So much for “JK frees caged children”. However, my burst of letter writing had another result, this time a meaningful one. I made contact with Emma Nicholson, the baroness and MEP, who has made the de-institutionalisation of children her life’s mission.

Emma had previously set up a charity in Romania that had helped drive the revolutionary change in that country’s child welfare system, where children’s homes under the Ceaucescu dictatorship were, in her words, “like Hieronymus Bosch’s vision of hell”. Now she wanted me to join her in creating a new campaigning charity, modelled upon the earlier one but with a much wider scope. This time we would be seeking to promote and protect children’s rights throughout Europe.

I went for a long walk with my husband after my meeting with Emma. Neil had only recently lectured me about keeping my commitments manageable. I was pregnant, I had a 10-year-old and a toddler, I was writing a novel for which rather a lot of people were waiting impatiently, and I already had several other charitable commitments. So I was a little nervous about telling him what I had just agreed to do.

Neil is a GP who worked for a time in Edinburgh’s largest psychiatric hospital. I finished my justification by talking about toddlers in cage beds. When I had babbled myself to a standstill he simply said, “Yes, you’ve got to do this.”

Late last month I flew to Bucharest for two days for the launch of the Children’s High Level Group. Everybody’s life throws up a bit of clumsy symbolism now and then: I had to stop breastfeeding my nearly one-year-old daughter a bit earlier than I had intended before leaving for the trip. The severing of that last tie to Mackenzie’s true babyhood, and the prospect of my longest ever separation from her and her two-year-old brother, felt like an ominous softening up for the business ahead.

We launched the Children’s High Level Group in Romania because it is the eastern European state that was prepared to admit that it had a problem with institutionalised children and opened its doors to external agencies that wanted to help. There is still much work to do there — more than 30,000 children remain in care — yet when you look at how far Romania has come it is hard not to concede that a minor miracle has been achieved.

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