Demand for overhaul of estranged parent law
Campaigners say international laws designed to stop estranged parents taking their children abroad must be overhauled.
Roz Osborne of charity Globalarrk, which helps parents in overseas custody battles, said: ”The Hague Convention on International Child Abduction was supposed to prevent estranged parents removing a child from their habitual country of residence.
“But we now find that this law is being used to return a child when a parent has fled abusive, broken relationships.
“Over 90 per cent of the cases we deal with have involved some kind of abuse, and when the Hague Convention is used to return a child in those circumstances, it can and does expose that child and vulnerable parent to further abuse.” Another Scots mum Janice Dunn from Barrhead, East Renfrewshire, has spent the last five years and over £70,000 fighting for custody of her son Frazer after being ordered to return him to Malta.
His father used the Hague Convention rules to force Janice to return their son after she left for Scotland with the boy when the couple’s relationship ended.
The court ordered that the boy should remain with the boy’s father in what became a bitter battle during which European Court of Justice found Janice, 46, had abducted her own child.
The anguished mum had to return to Scotland without Frazer after a legal battle that lasted years. Despite intervention from Prime Minister Boris Johnson when he was Foreign Secretary, Frazer has remained in Malta with his father Daniel Borg-olivier.