NEARLY 400 children a year are being kidnapped by a parent and taken to countries which flout international child custody laws.

The number of British children abducted has increased by 93 per cent since 1995, with the number of mothers who break the law on the rise. The Foreign Office has set up a child abduction unit to deal with the problem but campaign groups have accused the Government of failing to take a proactive approach to cases.

As a result, parents fighting for the return of their children are dependent on the host country obeying the rules on child abduction laid out by the Hague Convention. In all, 74 countries, including the United Kingdom, have signed the convention, which provides a procedure to secure the prompt return of children to the country in which they normally live. But campaigners say that adherence to the convention is patchy.

The Department for Constitutional Affairs, which administers the Hague Convention in Britain, admits that 10 of the 74 countries are not fulfilling their obligations. It has no records of children taken to these countries.

A charity called reunite International Child Abduction Centre has revealed that in 2003 it dealt with 255 new cases involving 373 children being taken from or brought into Britain. This represents a 93 per cent increase since 1995. The charity also recorded a significantly higher number of mothers, rather than fathers, taking their children abroad.

Denise Carter, the centre’s director, said: “Women are becoming more independent. We tend not to stay in a marriage, as maybe our parents would have done.”

Parents & Abducted Children Together, a charity run by Lady Catherine Meyer, the wife of Sir Christopher Meyer, the former British Ambassador to the United States, said that the Government was not doing enough for parents.

Lady Meyer’s two sons, Alexander and Constantin, were abducted by her former husband, Hans-Peter Volkmann, in 1994. He defied a court order by keeping them in Germany when they went there on holiday without their mother.

She has seen her children for only 24 hours since then, as German courts have repeatedly denied her access, although she has received backing from courts in Britain and France and support from politicians in Europe and the US.

She wrote a book about her experience, entitled They Are My Children, Too: A Mother’s Struggle For Her Sons.

Lady Meyer said the problem was much more widespread than the Government realised. Often parents were too afraid to report abductions to the authorities and the true figure could be as high as 4,000 incidents a year. “The Government does not collect exact figures, so we don’t know the true scale of the problem,” Lady Meyer said. “Our Government and our courts should be much tougher and protect British citizens much better. We should expose these injustices. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office should put pressure on governments abroad. We should follow the example of the French and the Americans, who seem to be more active in defending their victim parents.”

Children are often kidnapped after a holiday abroad or taken during contact visits. “Sadly, even the Hague Convention does not work as well as it should,” Lady Meyer said.

“In the UK, we seem to be playing by the rules and our judges have one of the highest rates of returning children who have been abducted and brought to the UK from abroad. But other countries do not necessarily abide by the rules as we do.”

The situation is even more difficult for parents who are trying to get their children back from countries that have not signed the Hague Convention, and the Department for Constitutional Affairs has no statistics for these countries. Many parents spend years and thousands of pounds in legal costs trying in vain to get their children back.

Although a Foreign Office representative can attend a court hearing with the parent and help in finding translators and local lawyers, they are not trained to give legal advice.

Lady Meyer criticised this hands-off approach, in which abduction is treated as a private legal matter. “Parental abduction is a matter of human rights and international law, which demands the direct involvement of governments,” she said. “There needs to be more work on prevention, and direct discussions with governments in countries that are not sending our children back.

“The British Government needs to take this problem more seriously, or parents who don’t like a custody decision will realise they can just take their child to another country and more and more families will have to suffer this heartbreak.”

According to the Foreign Office, parents have to rely on the legal systems in the countries in question. “We cannot interfere in the judicial process of another country,” an official said.

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