Claire escaped an abusive partner in the US and was given nine days’ notice to appear in court. Photograph: AlexLinch/Getty Images/iStockphoto View image in fullscreen Claire escaped an abusive partner in the US and was given nine days’ notice to appear in court. Photograph: AlexLinch/Getty Images/iStockphoto Domestic violence Hope for UK mothers accused of child abduction after fleeing domestic violence Women escaping abusive partners abroad could get new protections from legal analysis of Hague convention
Prefer the Guardian on Google British mothers who bring their children with them when returning to the UK after fleeing from domestic abuse abroad – which can lead to them being accused of abduction – could be given greater legal protection and support.
The government has agreed to examine how domestic abuse features in international child abduction cases, with a view to giving survivors of domestic abuse more help fighting partners’ demands that they return children to their home countries.
The changes would come too late for Claire, who lived in the US with an abusive partner and their two small children for more than a decade. But they could help mothers like her.
“We were all terrified of him. I was in near-constant fear for my life,” she said. “Eventually, I escaped and got us all on a plane back home to the UK.”
She lived in hiding for three months, but eventually had to apply for benefits. “Within a day, the police were at our door with summons under the Hague convention to appear in court just nine days later,” she said.
Approximately 500 Hague-convention applications for the return of a child are filed each year in England and Wales. Between 10% and 20% of children affected end up being separated from their primary carer owing to a formal court-ordered return.
Claire was fortunate: she used all of her savings to instruct a barrister, and her children were able to stay in the UK.
“I barely stood any chance even with legal representation – all my evidence of the domestic abuse was ignored,” she said. “It was only because my barrister persuaded the judge to let my oldest child, who was a few weeks short of the 14 years when courts will listen to their views, give evidence that I won the case.”
The new analysis, to be carried out by the Ministry of Justice’s private international family law team, will look at all cases held in the high court in London between 2024 and 2025 under the 1980 Hague convention.
The convention requires signatory countries to return children who have been unilaterally removed abroad within six weeks so that courts in their home countries can decide on future arrangements.
Campaigners hope the analysis, the first of its kind, will disprove the four-decade-old assumptions, baked into the convention, that all child abduction is harmful and that children must be returned immediately for overseas courts to decide their futures.
Ruth Dineen, international coordinator of the Filia Hague Mothers campaign , said the convention had been introduced in 1980 to protect children from the harmful effects of their wrongful removal from their home country.
“But the circumstances surrounding international child abduction have changed substantially since then,” she said. “There are far more relationships between parents of different nationalities, so it’s much more common for families to live abroad. We also have a far greater understanding of the impact of domestic abuse and coercive control.”
Roz Osborne,…