I was invited to attend the June 2011 special commission meeting on the Hague Convention on International Parental Child Abduction as a member of PACT- Parents and Abducted Children Together, Catherine Meyer´s organization. Catherine is a special lady. More about her in the words that follow.
The Hague: My first impression is one of an old-world European city that manages to be friendly and laid-back at the same time as it is well-established and old-world. My mother, my son Aidan (along for the trip) and I arrive together with Catherine Meyer, the dynamic, wonderful founder of Parents and Abducted Children Together (aka PACT), at Schiphol Airport. Catherine is one of my heroes. Her two sons were abducted from her to Germany by her ex-husband, and she has been a tireless advocate and voice for those who go through abduction ever since. Her years in Washington, DC, as the British Ambassador´s wife (her husband is Sir Christopher Meyer, former British Ambassador), were used to advocate for the cause. Catherine wrote a moving book about her experience, called They are My Children, Too. Catherine is important to me. As a mother whose children were abducted, she brought the issue to a new light by being so public about her story while in Washington, and she touches many people by telling her story and by her work on the issue.
The conference took place at the famous Peace Palace. What a beautiful building! I love the name, it evokes calm and comfort, and is a wonderful place to be to work together to find common solutions and international cooperation on the issue of parental child abduction.
The conference room took my breath away. A few hundred people, each representing a country or organization, all sitting in rows with their country or organization´s "flag" before them, microphones for each. Above us, the many interpreters sat, to aid us in understanding one another.
I got to talk about my experience a bit to the crowd, in the context of the continued importance of the Convention in preventing the incidence of "forum shopping," of parents abducting children more than once in order to find a more sympathetic forum, or court. The Convention aims to prevent this by sending the abductor and child back to where they came from. I got applause from the audience after sharing my family´s forum shopping story: many lands and two sets of kids were involved because the Hague Convention did not exist at the time.
It was heartwarming to me to feel the energy in the air, and to know that they, all two or three hundred attendees, were there to deal with parental abduction! With what was my story! I fought tears at times, choked back emotions, as I took in the fact that all those people understood that abduction is not just "a simple domestic matter," and that parentally abducted kids are not "safe and okay just because they are with a parent!"
