2010 State Dept report on Hague Compliance is out

[LukieD]

Here's the report:

http://travel.state.gov/pdf/2010ComplianceReport.pdf

Interestingly, Brazil, Mexico and Honduras were all labelled NON-COMPLIANT (Honduras was the only non-compliant country in the 2009 report). Only Bulgaria was labelled as "demonstrating patterns of non-compliance." Last year, Brazil and Mexico were in the latter category and there were eight countries in total deemed less-compliant. So while it's good news that Brazil and Mexico are in the proper category for the first time, what are we to make of the list of "less-compliant" countries essentially disappearing? Could their track records have improved that much in one year? The countries that demonstrated patterns of non-compliance in 2009 but don't appear on the list this year are Chile, Greece, Slovakia, Switzerland and Venezuela. Duid things really get better with those countries since the issuance of last year's report? Bulgaria is new to the less-compliant list for 2010.

The report contains a description of the Goldman case in the "Notable Cases" section on page 26. It also describes the Athukorala abduction case to the Domincan Republic on page 28.

[forthelost]

The "case illustration" on page 12 is almost certainly that of Stefan Barbat-Alexander.

[tweinstein]

My case has moved up from number 6 (2009 report) to number 4 in the Brazil section (page 43).

[UD_student]

The countries that demonstrated patterns of non-compliance in 2009 but don't appear on the list this year are Chile, Greece, Slovakia, Switzerland and Venezuela. Did things really get better with those countries since the issuance of last year's report?

A guess would be no, Slovakia has not improved as children shouldn't be deciding what parent to live with years after the abduction. Now, one could argue that case took place 2008, which would have been in last year's report, but I highly doubt things have improved dramatically in just a few months.

http://bringseanhome.org/forums/index.php/topic,2993.0.html

[UD_student]

The 'notable case' to Austria on page 26 is Tom Sylvester's case. He spoke at the December 2 Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission Hearings.  I was surprised to hear that the US State Department successfully urged the 'Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, which supervises the European Court of Human Rights judgments' to not close the case in March 2010. Does anyone know what happened with that decision? Just a wild guess, but I imagine it doesn't mean Tom Sylvester has his daughter Carina back...

[SageDad]

I'm still reviewing this report, but I'm disappointed in it.  There was no real accounting for why they downgraded Mexico and Brazil or dropped all the other countries.  If these countries have improved, or regressed, it should be called out.  State is not being transparent about how it is measuring compliance and it's clear to anyone paying attention that politics has more to do with who ends up where than actual performance does. 

I should clarify that, unlike Brazil, this is not the first time Mexico's been in the "fully noncompliant" category.  This marks the tenth year that State has issued a Compliance Report.  Mexico's been in all of them but was also "fully noncompliant" in '99 and '02-'04 making Mexico "noncompliant" for 5 of the past 10 years (but State keeps talking about the progress Mexico is making.)

The report is also filled with useless fluff.  Why do they include the full text of the Hague Convention?  I was also surprised to see that my son's case does not appear in the report.  State says they are giving an accounting of cases that have been unresolved for 18 months or more.  The reality is that the cases listed as unresolved are all at least 27 months old.  They count the date the case starts as the date the Hague application is filed and end the reporting period for the year in Sept, then don't release a report till around June of the following year meaning any case that qualifies as 18 months or older is actually at least 27 months old by the time the report is published.

[Nicole's Dad]

What value is this report? Does any other Hague partner or country issue a report or we the only ones that do it? Why are we doing it. Why isn't the International Hague Courts doing the report? It would probably have more impact than more lip service from the US.

[SageDad]

What value is this report? Does any other Hague partner or country issue a report or we the only ones that do it? Why are we doing it. Why isn't the International Hague Courts doing the report? It would probably have more impact than more lip service from the US.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hague_Abduction_Convention_Compliance_Reports

[M.Capestro]

For the U.S., Brazil does not meet treatise on childcare
http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/cotidiano/ult95u739152.shtml
22/05/2010 - 12:07 pm


The Brazilian justice is slow in deciding cases of international dispute for custody of children, and when it deals with them or examine the guard itself, and the competence to do so would be in another country.

With these arguments, the U.S. ranked Brazil this year as one of three countries that violate the Hague Convention on international child abductions, reports Johanna Nublat In a report published in this Saturday's Sheet (full  only available to subscribers of the newspaper or UOL).

It is the first time that Brazil is in this condition in the annual report on the subject, sent to Congress yesterday. The document cites 31 new children illegally detained in Brazil. The other two countries mentioned are Honduras and Mexico.

The treaty made an impression in the country with the disputes between the U.S. and David Goldman Brazilian grandparents of her son, Sean (completed in December, with the return of the boy to the U.S.), and between the former volleyball player Hilma Caldeira and her ex-husband, fellow American Birotte Kelvin (the dispute is ongoing).

The Hague Convention says that custody should be decided in the country where the family lived. In both these cases, the forum would be the USA. Since 2006, Brazil was listed as part of the dutiful convention.

[LukieD]

What value is this report?

Seems to me that's the appropriate question to ask. Who cares? If there is absolutely no consequences, diplomatically, economically, or politically, to showing up on that list as non-compliant, why the hell would any of these countries even care? And I agree with Marty, wouldn't this report carry a lot more weight if it were issued by the Hague Permanent Bureau and included an objective evaluation of the performance of the United States? Such a report would be a very good basis for legislation to determine which countries the US should be going after with the threat of sanctions. That may not be realistic as I know nothing of the resources available to the Hague Bureau in the Netherlands but for goodness sake, anything is better than what we have now. If this report is not tied to some sort of actionable consequences for non-compliance, it's more or less useless. Why would Congress mandate this annual compliance report if it did not intend to do something productiev with the information contained in it?

[tweinstein]

What value is this report?

I remember having this debate with a number of case workers at the OCI (there have been 4 since my children were retained). One of the earlier ones told me that they were preparing a démarche (presumably to deliver at the United Nations). Of course this never happened. When I asked a later one about the progress of this démarche, she knew nothing of it, but argued that they could list Brazil as non-compliant in the Annual Report, to which I responded, "But who reads this report other than the left-behind parents?"

[SageDad]

These reports are far from useless.  A lot of hard work went into forcing State to compile these reports and State fought it every step of the way.  As it stands today these reports are probably the single best sources of information on abduction numbers for American children.  That is a sad statement I know, but it remains true.  In a real sense these reports also make me mad because they don't include a lot of important demographical information that could easily be added and they are fudged massively by not accounting for voluntary returns or deportations, but they are still a real achievement by prior generations of LBP's.  I don't doubt that State would love to not publish this report at all and keep the magnitude of the problem and the countries involved as quiet and obscure as possible.  State's fudging and a general lack of consequences notwithstanding, I've been looking forward to this report for a while.

Texas courts have made a number of decisions holding Mexico's legal system inneffective and lacking legal mechanisms for the immediate and effective enforcement of child custody orders.  These decisions were used to deny travel to Mexico and unsupervised visitation to parents viewed as a flight risk (this is great but to my knowledge it's only used against fathers.)  As evidence for these decisions these courts relied exclusively on the State Department's Compliance Reports.

It would be fantastic if the Permanent Bureau would release an annual Compliance Report but then of course they'd need to trust the member countries to give them good numbers, something they've all been reluctant to do.  Incadat was an official Permanent Bureau effort to gather good statistics and information on the effectiveness of the Convention but most countries, including the US, do not participate in it.  

[liesl78]

The report may be useless, but according to what Juli Rosi posted, Folha de Sao Paulo noticed it and published an article, which had the Itamaraty going on record. They're not happy and are saying that Brazil's record doesn't reflect Brazil's efforts.

Riiiight...

ETA: spell check

[Nicole's Dad]

What value is this report? Does any other Hague partner or country issue a report or we the only ones that do it? Why are we doing it. Why isn't the International Hague Courts doing the report? It would probably have more impact than more lip service from the US.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hague_Abduction_Convention_Compliance_Reports

And your point is?

[SageDad]

umm.. I pretty much spelled it out in my subsequent post if the Wikipedia article wasn't clear....  C'mon people... HR 3240 uses this very report to trigger its effects.  Countries only run afoul of HR 3240 when they get on this report.  Not only is it not useless it's critical that it exist and be accurate.