Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-03-13-Speech-3-387"
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"en.20020313.17.3-387"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, you have listed a lot of very worthy projects. As rapporteur I hope very much that I will receive the tidied-up proposal which is due in April. It has been mentioned in the question as well. The problem is that there are quite a number of serious practical problems that we have to deal with. For example, Mrs Gebhardt and Mrs Berès sit on a particular committee in France dealing with these issues. I understand that there are, at this very moment, about 50 outstanding cases. The biggest problem – from the case-load I have – seems to be where parents are denied visiting rights by the custodial parent.
I should like to list, for the record of the House, the active cases I am working on at the moment. Mr Eric Comet, whose children are in Finland, was granted custody by the courts in Finland. This custody he could never exercise. His children no longer wish to see him. In Sweden we have two cases of fathers seeking visiting rights to their children: Philippe Paquay and Kevin Willoughby. In Germany, believed by most people who work in this area to be the country where most of these difficulties exist, we have Mr Guy Foster and Mr Chris McMullen; and probably one of the best-known cases of all, Lady Catherine Meyer, the wife of the British Ambassador in Washington, who has seen her two sons for precisely 24 hours in the past six years.
In the Netherlands we have Mr Morales-Gouvenne and in Austria we have Noël Dumont. The problem is that particularly in Germany, social workers seem to be able, under German law, to make decisions about access and custody which, in some cases, take no note of decisions made in courts in other countries. In very many cases, the judges involved have perhaps only one case of this sort throughout their working life and are therefore unfamiliar with what the Hague Convention and hopefully now this new regulation will entail.
We still see – and unfortunately this is at the heart of most of these cases – parents using their unfortunate children as weapons in the war between the sexes.
Commissioner, you mentioned the Hague Convention of 1996 which, thankfully, was recognised last November. However, it has not been signed by any Member State, nor by the Community. This is causing serious problems because at the heart of that legislation is the recognition of the right of every child to know and have access to both its parents."@en1
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