Lady Meyer Struggles for Parental Rights

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 2, 2000 | by Timothy W. Maier

Catherine Meyer's former husband stole her children away to Germany. She now lobbies for laws that would make international parental child abductions a crime.

Ever since her two sons Alexander and Constantin were kidnapped to Germany in 1994 by her estranged former husband, Catherine Meyer has been fighting back. Because if it can happen to Lady Meyer, now the wife of the ambassador of the United Kingdom to the United States, it can happen to anyone. And it has. Thousands of parents find themselves in similar situations.

In her 1998 book, They Are My Children, Too, she painfully describes the ordeal she has endured since she was robbed of sharing her children's childhood. Alexander was 9 years old and Constantin was 7 when their father, Hans-Peter Volkmann, a German physician, decided not to return the children to their mother in London as was required under British law.

During the last six years, Lady Meyer has worked in the United States with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, or NCMEC, and has lobbied for laws against child abduction. She was instrumental in getting a congressional resolution passed this year in the House and Senate urging compliance with the Hague Convention, an international treaty designed to reunite children with custodial parents. She frequently testifies before Congress and her testimony helped launch a current General Accounting Office investigation of Hague violations in Germany, Austria and Sweden.

Lady Meyer heads a loose federation called Parents of Abducted Children Together, or PACT, a support group primarily for parents whose children are detained in Germany. She also is working with NCMEC to set up an international division. The founding meeting is set for November.

When she sat down recently with Insight at the British Embassy in Washington she was asked what it is like to fight for six years and still not have her children. "You begin to understand people who are wrongfully convicted, serve time in jail and then dedicate the whole of their lives to fighting for justice. You become like that," she says, clutching photographs of her sons. She fought to told back tears as she told the story of her long crusade for justice.

Insight: Go back to Aug. 20, 1994.

Catherine Meyer: I came home and there was a registered letter waiting for me. I recognized the handwriting of my ex-husband. As I opened the letter I was trembling because there was something wrong about it. Why didn't he just telephone me? When I got to the phrase, "There is something I must tell you,' I knew. I immediately telephoned a friend and was crying on the telephone as I said, "He's not sending the children back from their holidays." And this old friend, quite knowledgeable of the legal system, said: "Well, that's terrible, and this is very serious. He can't do that. That's illegal."

Insight: Were you separated at the time?

CM: For about two years. I had custody and my ex-husband had access rights. And what happened was that I sent the children on holidays according to our arrangement.

Insight: This never happened before?

CM: No, but there were some signs that I describe in my book. It just never dawned on me that he could do a thing like that.

Insight: How often have you seen your boys since that time?

CM: In more than six years I've been allowed to see them a total of 24 hours. For the first five years I was never allowed to see them alone. The longest time I was allowed to be with them was two-and-one-half hours, and there were periods of one year, for instance, in which I wasn't allowed to see the children at all. It's an indescribable feeling. I mean, it's bereavement. In some ways it's worse than a bereavement because it never has an end.

Insight: Tell us about those meetings.

CM: In December 1998 I was able to see the children on my own with my present husband, Christopher, without a third party being present. At the beginning of the meeting it was very tense. Constantin was even afraid of getting into a car with us to drive out to a restaurant. But Alexander, who at that time I hadn't seen for nearly a year, was calm. We sat for lunch, the four of us, and it turned out to be nice.

The next visit I had was six weeks later in January of 1999. The children immediately became tense and aggressive and said they wanted to leave. The question naturally arises as to what happened during six weeks to change the children's attitude so much. They became really antagonistic, and by the time we saw them in February both said, "We don't want to see you anymore."

Insight: Any evidence of physical abuse?

CM: No. But nothing compares to psychological abuse. In some ways it's really more frightening because you don't see the marks, you don't know what the long-term effects might be.

Insight: What language did they speak?

CM: German, which was another huge problem because I speak only pidgin German. That was not the language in which I spoke to my children. This puts an additional barrier between them and me.

I asked Alexander, "Why don't you want to see me?" And he started reciting, "Because you wrote a book full of lies." And I said, "Alexander, have you read my book?" And he said, "No, but Daddy tells me."