Countries Ignore Hague Convention

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 18, 2000 | by Timothy W. Maier

Reports released by the GAO and State Department show that the U.S. government is failing to help return to their American parents children illegally abducted overseas.

As the nation awaited the outcome of the presidential election, the hundreds of cases of international parental kidnappings once again were placed on the back burner -- but perhaps not for long. Should Texas Gov. George W. Bush become president, there would be a candle of hope for thousands of parents longing to be reunited with their children. They know that the Bush campaign gave a sympathetic hearing to this issue, which has been all but ignored under the Clinton/Gore administration, according to high-level sources working with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children on international parental kidnapping cases.

A ranking source working on the international cases says that Vice President Al Gore and his wife, Tipper, have taken zero interest in these tragic children, whereas Bush wants to get actively involved. "I'm surprised about Tipper, but I'm afraid Bush would be better for us," says the source, who also praised Democratic New York senator-elect Hillary Rodham Clinton for calling it a human-rights issue even though her husband failed to support the remarks.

Meanwhile, parents continue to engage in a war of words with countries reluctant to follow the Hague Convention, a multilateral agreement designed to return abducted children to their custodial parent. Last year the complaints of victimized parents and Insight's coverage of the issue (see Insightmag.com under "Back Issues" and "Investigative Stories") prompted congressional hearings, changes in a Justice Department task-force report and two General Accounting Office (GAO) reports outlining some of the problems. Certainly the congressional hearings alone provided sufficient evidence for Congress and the nation to see how completely the Hague Convention has failed.

While the GAO reports at least raised the issue, they failed to provide the texture and context of the story. Even the most recent GAO investigation, triggered by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms of North Carolina, was another incomplete probe. Published as Status of U.S. Parental Child Abductions to Germany, Sweden and Austria, it failed to include interviews with suffering parents anxious to detail how and why the system is not working.

Tom Johnson, a State Department attorney whose daughter, Amanda, has been captive in Sweden for the last five years, put it this way: "As you can see, the failure to talk to the only people who really know the situation in each country [i.e., the left-behind parents] resulted in a fairly worthless report and the omission of some leading cases. Instead, the GAO relied exclusively on the people they were supposed to be investigating -- the Office of Children's Issues at the State Department."

Johnson meanwhile has caught the attention of House International Relations Committee Chairman Benjamin Gilman of New York, who has begun a personal crusade to get the State Department to make these cases a top priority. Gilman requested an additional GAO report, and parents remain hopeful that the State Department's annual report on Hague Convention compliance would reveal a change of course. The report is supposed to warn and educate U.S. courts, lawyers and parents on this issue, but it hasn't done that in the past.

So it comes as no surprise that when the State Department released its most recent Hague Convention compliance report it was met with disdain by Gilman. After reviewing the report, Compliance with the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, Gilman slammed the State Department for the callous way in which it classified cases as "resolved," and in particular for moving abusing countries, including Germany and Sweden, from the noncompliant category to partially compliant.

Gilman, like so many of the grieving left-behind parents, says he is astonished at the State Department calling cases "resolved and therefore closed," when this in fact "presents an inaccurate picture of the level of compliance by all signatories of the Hague Convention." In other words, as soon as a foreign country denies a U.S. parent's Hague application, the State Department regards the case as resolved and no longer active.

Even more upset with this report was Rep. Nick Lampson, D-Texas, chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, who says the State Department report not only is inaccurate but violates the statutory reporting requirements. Lampson calls the report "unacceptable to Congress." He told Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright that it is nearly as useless as the 1999 report, which claimed there were 58 "unresolved" cases after 18 months but failed to identify even one offending country.

While the State Department may indeed have violated the statutory reporting requirement, any penalty apparently will have to wait until the presidential election is sorted out. Under a Bush administration, someone might get fired. In the meantime, Helms is considering whether to force the State Department to rewrite the report.