Child a week is abducted and taken out of country
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MORE than one child a week was abducted from Ireland over the past year as the recession sparks a rise in international custody disputes.
The Central Authority for Child Abduction said it had processed 120 new applications in 2009 with the majority of these involving children who were abducted out of the country.
Of the new cases, 55 concerned abductions into Ireland and 65 were out of the State.
In most cases, the abductions took place between Ireland and Britain.
However, the rise in the number of foreigners coming to work in the State over the past decade has seen a growth in applications involving Eastern European countries and the United States.
Snatched
Of those abductions into Ireland, children were taken from countries including Latvia, Germany, Australia and other European countries. Meanwhile, children taken out of this jurisdiction were taken to countries including Poland, the US and South Africa.
Most children are snatched by one of their parents following a breakdown of the relationship.
The Irish Centre for Parentally Abducted Children (ICPAC) pointed out that the number of children abducted out of Ireland could be much higher as official figures do not include those taken to countries that have not signed up to the Hague Convention.
Former MEP and president of ICPAC Mary Banotti said: "The thing I'm finding most distressing is the children being taken to Muslim countries because we can't get them back. Morocco has partially signed it (the Convention); most of them won't."
She said it was "next to impossible" to have children returned from non-Hague countries and that it was usually only when the father was imprisoned that the child would be returned to their mother.
"What's changed in the last 10 years is the countries that children are taken to. Prior to the mass influx of immigrants, children were mainly taken to Britain or America, and now it's Eastern Europe."
Marion Campbell, a solicitor specialising in family law, said the recession is fuelling an increase in relocation applications in the courts as one parent moves abroad in search of work.
From her examination of applications, she said the majority were rejected and the court had ordered that the child remain in Ireland. While relocation cases were markedly different from abductions, whether or not the country was a signatory to the Hague Convention was again hugely important.
Nationalities
"What's happening at the moment is that we have a mixture of nationalities that were never here before and that includes people from countries that are not under the Hague Convention. That is a big issue -- kids go away and are never seen again."
Among Ms Campbell's clients was a Dublin woman who issued proceedings in the District Court aimed at stopping her former partner, a foreign national, from having unsupervised access to their son.
"He was being made redundant and she was worried that if he got unsupervised access he'd bring the child out of the country. We found three passports -- it was a huge concern.
The ICPAC recommends that parents who are concerned their child may be abducted out of the country take a number of precautionary steps, including making themselves known to their local gardai and informing their child's creche or school about who is allowed to collect the child.
- Breda Heffernan
Irish Independent
