It's hard to imagine a worse parental nightmare than the abduction of a child to another country

http://dir.salon.com/story/mwt/feature/2003/01/07/custody/index1.html

That ruling, along with a court decision last May in Australia that also deemed Israel too dangerous for children, and similar rulings reportedly issued in Spain and Romania, could have profound implications for how countries handle future incidents of international child abduction, say legal experts. Those cases were all adjudicated under the Hague Convention.

It's hard to imagine a worse parental nightmare than the abduction of a child to another country. It has been played out in the public eye recently in high-profile and heartbreaking cases involving American women who have charged their Saudi Arabian ex-husbands with fleeing back to their homeland, kids in tow, and forbidding the mothers all contact. But unlike the United States and Israel, Saudi Arabia is not a signatory to the Hague Convention and is not bound by its provisions. Neither is Cuba, which nonetheless loudly demanded the return of Elián Gonzalez to his father -- a demand that the U.S., after long months of wavering, felt forced to recognize as legitimate.

In those cases, the conflicts have revolved around the authoritarian nature of the regime, either the one in which the children were currently living, as in the Saudi Arabian cases, or the one demanding repatriation, as in the Gonzalez situation. Unlike those disputes, Hague Convention cases have generally attracted little public attention. However, in making terrorist attacks against Israel an argument against returning children there, the recent court decisions could be used to justify not returning children to other countries as well, say some lawyers.

Around the world, more than 1,000 child abduction cases are filed under the Hague Convention every year. According to research conducted by the Centre for International Family Law Studies at Cardiff University in Wales, in 1999, for example, close to 1,300 Hague applications involving more than 2,000 children were registered by the designated central authorities in signatories to the convention. Of those, 466 cases involved the United States -- as either the left-behind country or the one to which the child was believed to have been abducted -- and 57 involved Israel.

Crouch and other experts wonder how Americans would react if foreign judges began refusing to return abducted children to New York or Washington, D.C., citing the Sept. 11 attacks and the terror alerts that have followed. They venture that, under similar reasoning, children would not have been sent back to England during the period when the Irish Republican Army was most active there, or to Northern Ireland at any point in the recent past. In the modern world, they ask, is any country -- and especially the U.S., which has identified itself as a prime terrorist target -- a safe haven for children?

The Minnesota ruling, and those in the other countries, were made possible by an exception in the procedure outlined by the Hague Convention for dealing with international custody disputes. That exception bars the return of a child to the custody of a parent if the move would expose the child to "a grave risk [of] physical or psychological harm or otherwise place the child in an intolerable situation." Frequently interpreted to apply to harm related to the child's personal or family circumstances, the "grave risk" can also relate to the political situation in what is generally referred to in Hague cases as "the left-behind country."

But Crouch and other experts in international law say that the exceptions were always intended to be narrowly interpreted and invoked in only the most extreme circumstances -- when a country is in such chaos that the court system has stopped functioning, for example -- so as not to undermine the future viability of the convention. This is particularly important, they say, because there is no final international court of appeal. Since each case is ultimately decided by judges in the country in which the child is currently located, the treaty relies for its continued effectiveness solely on the good will of the domestic courts of each signatory nation.

Susan McKay, the Minnesota lawyer handling Robert Silverman's case, says she knows of no statistics that specifically compare, for example, the rates of childhood death in the United States and Israel from gun deaths, traffic accidents, murder and other unnatural causes. But she argues that judges in other countries could, citing the Hague Convention rulings against Israel, point to random killings in the United States, not just the threat of terrorist attacks, as a reason not to return abducted kids. "What's the distinction between acts of terror for political motivations versus just violent propensities or craziness, like what's gone on with the sniper shootings in D.C. or Columbine?" she says.

Next Page: Before the convention existed, the return rate of children was basically zero