Sad story 
What do you guys think?
A sad story indeed, but it would seem the court’s hands are tied.
Unfortunately, we haven’t yet been told a lot of the details. It does appear the girls have resisted being sent back but the ruling is that they have to go back for a custody HEARING, not that they’re being sent back to the mother forever.
I don’t know why the woman would want to force the kids to live in England when they could live in Canada, when they WANT to live in Canada, and are Canadians. The choice seems pretty obvious to me.
But the mother is perfectly entitled to have her day in court, is she not? Look at it from her perspective; the father simply spirited the kids away to Canada under the pretext of just visiting an ailing relative and then “decided to stay.” Riiight. And it’s impossible to say how much of the girls’ resistance is a product of her bein g a bad mother and how much is because he’d had a year to convince them she’s a bad mother. We’ve only heard one side of the case. A court of law, sadly, is the only place this can be resolved.
The father stole the children to another country without consulting the mother. They should of course be returned.
Small children can be manipulated to say just about anything, and it seems the father is using them to further his cause.
This happened in my family with my niece. My sister and her husband were in the Air Force over in Europe, and he got out. Well, my sister, to be honest, is a nasty little person, and when he got out over in Europe he got tired of her and left. To Iowa. With my niece. That was 10 years ago. My niece is now 11 years old, and she wouldn’t know any of us from Adam (including her mother) if she saw us. It’s a bitter wound within our family that I don’t think will ever heal.
So yeah, the woman is entitled to a hearing at the very minimum. Why this can’t happen in Canada is beyond me, though. After all, they’re Canadians.
Probably because of this(from the above link):
The lawyer in that article offends me to my core “We cannot let 10 year olds and 5 year olds determine how our justice system works” so we must make the crucial decisions in their life with no respect for them as the most affected party? I mean, yeah these kids haven’t reached their majority but this seems an awful way to think of the issue – a battle over the law rather than a very real battle over the lives of these children. Though if it is only a hearing, I don’t see why they can’t have the hearing in Britain and stay with the father while it is going on there.
As RickJay notes, the court ruling in this case was not a decision on custody. (Sorry, Kytheria, but your thread title is not correct.)
The Convention on International Child Abduction does not determine custody - it just provides that if the parents split up, they should determine the custody issue by the laws of the jurisdiction where they were living, and where the children’s residence was. The reason for the Convention is that it’s meant to discourage the situation Airman Doors gives - where one parent spirits the kids away from the other parent. The Convention rewards the parent who applies to the local court for a determination, and penalises the parent who skips town, taking the child without the other parent’s permission. The basic assumption is that it’s never in the best interests of the child to be spirited out of a country by one parent without the other parent knowing, and that it is in the best interests of the child that the parents determine the custody issue in the local court of the jurisdiciton where they live, to minimise disruption to the child’s life if what is a very stressful time.
The Convention doesn’t give the courts much discretion, and that is intentional - one parent should not be able to manipulate the system by bringing the kids to his home country, then calling in the media and saying, “These kids are Canadian citizens - they should stay here” and hoping to use sympathy to sway the judge or the politicians. The strict rule is designed to reward the parent who plays by the rules and brings a custody applicaiton in the jurisdiciton where the kids live, and to discourage the parent who takes the kids and runs. The goal is to minimise the disruption to the children’s lives, instead of having them splashed on the front page of the newspapers, which is what the dad chose to do here.
Now that the kids are going back to England, the father will have to play fair and go back to the English courts to apply for custody. Who knows? maybe the English court will rule that it is in the best interests of the kids to go back to Dad in Canada. Something like that happened in one case under the Convention that I was involved with. The Canadian courts ruled that the mother had breached the convention by bringing the child here from the U.S. without dad’s permision, and ordered the return of the child to the U.S. However, the U.S. court eventually ordered custody to the mother, who then brought the child to live in Canada, consistent with that custody decress from the U.S. court. A lot of heartbreack and costs could have been saved if the mother had just applied to the court where she was living in the first place, rather than take the child without the dad’s permision.