[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 56 (Tuesday, May 9, 2000)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3683-S3684]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




             REUNITING AMERICAN CHILDREN AND THEIR PARENTS

  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, throughout the dispute over Elian Gonzalez, 
I have argued that he should be reunited with his father Juan Miguel, I 
have made this argument because I believe that children belong with 
their parents, barring evidence of unfitness. I also made this argument 
because I was concerned about how American parents are being treated 
internationally.
  At the Judiciary Committee hearing held on the Elian Gonzalez case on 
March 1, I also urged that we consider the potential impact of that 
case on those of U.S. parents fighting to gain custody of their 
children in other countries. In fact, at that hearing I made sure to 
invite a U.S. parent who has struggled for years just for the right to 
see his children in Japan, and who believes, as do other American 
parents in similar circumstances, that to preserve American credibility 
we must practice what we preach and reunite Elian Gonzalez and his 
father.
  I worked for months on such a case of an American child who was taken 
abroad by an estranged parent. Had it not been for the active 
intervention of the Government of Egypt, the child would not have been 
reunited with his American mother. Reuniting Elian and his father was 
the best thing for Elian and also the best way to advance American 
interests--and the interests of American parents whose children have 
been taken abroad without their consent.
  At the March 1 hearing, I quoted Mary Ryan, the Assistant Secretary 
of State for Consular Affairs, who had testified in the federal court 
case regarding Elian Gonzalez that a failure to enforce the INS' 
decision that Elian Gonzalez should be reunited with his father would 
``be inconsistent with the principles we advocate on behalf of the 
United States and could have potentially lasting negative implications 
for left-behind parents in the United States and for U.S. citizen 
children taken to foreign countries.''
  I believe that the American government should stand behind that 
principle and seek to bring children and their parents back together. I 
am proud that the government has reunited Elian and his father, and I 
think the pictures of the two of them together have proven beyond a 
doubt that this was the right result.
  But I am deeply concerned that the energy and effectiveness that our 
government showed in reuniting Elian and his father does not always 
seem to apply to its attempts to reunite American children and their 
parents. Indeed, recent articles in the Washington Post indicate that 
our State Department should take a far more active role in helping 
American parents who--in violation of international law--are being 
deprived of custody of their children.
  The Washington Post tells the story of Joseph Cooke, a New York man 
whose then-wife took their two young children to Germany and, without 
Mr. Cooke's consent, turned the children over to the state because she 
felt unable to care for them. For a year and a half, Mr. Cooke was 
unable to find out what had happened to his children, as his wife 
refused even to tell him where they were. When he finally was able to 
locate them, he sought custody of them in both American and German 
courts. Although he obtained a custody order from an American court, 
which under the Hague Convention is binding upon Germany since the 
children had resided in the United States for all of their young lives, 
the German courts have refused to grant him custody. Instead, they have 
ruled that the children should stay with their foster parents, in part 
because during the drawn-out German legal process, the children learned 
German, went to German schools, and grew attached to their foster 
parents. The court felt that reuniting these children with their father 
would result in ``severe psychological loss.''
  The State Department's reaction to this case hardly befits the 
importance of the issue involved. Despite Germany's obligations under 
the Hague Convention, a State Department spokeswoman told the 
Washington Post, ``We're not the courts. It's up to the courts to make 
those kinds of decisions.'' The very point of the Hague Convention is 
to provide countries with a diplomatic opportunity to question the 
rulings of courts outside the country were the children habitually 
reside. The Convention is rendered meaningless if our State Department 
is not willing to act as a strong advocate for American parents. As the 
Post reported, only 80 out of the 369 children--22 percent--who were 
the subject of Hague applications from American parents from 1990 to 
1998 have come back to the United States, and that number includes 
those children who were voluntarily returned. Meanwhile, U.S. courts 
have returned 90 percent of children who were the subject of Hague 
applications in other countries.
  In other words, while America obeys its treaty obligations, it has 
failed to enforce our own treaty rights. This is not a minor problem, 
either. The State Department says that it has 1,148 open international 
custody cases, and there are surely far more cases that have not been 
reported to the government. The State Department should be doing 
everything within its power to help American parents. I implore our 
government to pay more attention to this issue, and I ask our allies to 
abide by their own duties under the Hague Convention.
  I ask unanimous consent to enter an editorial on this matter from 
today's Washington Post into the Record.
  There being no objection, the editorial was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                [From the Washington Post, May 9, 2000]

                            Stolen Children

       When Congress was considering legislation that would have 
     kept Elian Gonzalez in this country, State Department 
     officials argued that such a precedent could disrupt their 
     efforts to intervene in cases where American parents have had 
     children abducted abroad. A sound argument, with one big 
     problem: It turns out that in many of the 1,100 open cases in 
     which American parents are fighting to get their children 
     back from recalcitrant court systems in other countries, the 
     State Department isn't making much effort on the parents' 
     behalf. The heartwrenching story of Joseph Cooke and his 
     children, told Sunday in this newspaper by Post reporters 
     Cindy Loose and William Drozdiak, highlights an unusually 
     egregious problem with German-American custody battles in 
     particular: In at least 30 cases, advocates say, German 
     judges have flouted basic tenets of the 1980 Hague treaty on 
     international abductions, to which their country is a 
     signatory, and kept children from parents who had 
     overwhelming claims to them. But the Cooke story also reveals 
     an almost incomprehensibly lackadaisical U.S. Government 
     response to the

[[Page S3684]]

     human tragedies that arise when a parent cannot get his or 
     her rights enforced.
       The Hague Convention calls for quick resolution of custody 
     disputes in the country where a child ``habitually resides.'' 
     The law lacks teeth: An official at the U.S. Embassy in 
     Germany told a Post reporter that he viewed the Hague 
     Convention as ``a voluntary compliance sort of thing.'' Up 
     the ladder, it's the same: U.S. ambassadors fail to raise 
     individual cases or to make diplomatic noise over these 
     cases. German officials say they cannot intervene in the 
     court system. German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, 
     meeting with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright this week, 
     echoed that view when the secretary raised the Cooke case--
     though Mr. Fischer said he was touched by the Cookes' 
     ``personal tragedy.''
       American reluctance to apply diplomatic pressure makes no 
     more sense than German excuses about ``interfering'' in the 
     judiciary. Public and private pressure through diplomatic 
     channels on behalf of sundered families can indeed have an 
     effect; so could legislation to require judges to be trained 
     in the applicable laws. When an ally such as Germany flouts 
     good conduct in this regard, the issue should rise to the top 
     of the diplomatic agenda, not be shunted aside.

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