Blackburn (UK) mum wins legal battle to bring son home from Turkey

[M.Capestro]

Blackburn mum wins legal battle to bring son home from Turkey
http://www.blackburncitizen.co.uk/news/9415312.Blackburn_mum_wins_legal_battle_to_bring_son_home_from_Turkey/

Tuesday 13th December 2011 in News
By Catherine Pye

A TUG-of-love mum has won an international court battle to get her toddler back.
 
Anisa Khansia said she has endured a “living hell” since her estranged Turkish husband refused to hand back two-year-old Amani in July.
 
Now the 29-year-old, who has not seen her son since, hopes he will be home for Christmas.
 
Amani has been staying with his father, Mehmet Baki Sakaraglu, and extended family in the holiday resort of Marmaris in Turkey.
 
But now, after months of wrangling, Ms Khansia has won a Hague Convention case stating the child must be returned to her in the UK.
 
In anticipation she has wrapped up dozens of presents ready for her son to open on Christmas Day.
 
Ms Khansia, of Little Harwood, Blackburn, said: “It’s brilliant news. The thing is justice has been done.
 
“In court they said that Amani must be returned to me.

“All of my family is hoping it’s before Christmas, but I’m trying not to get too excited because there is still red tape.
 
“There’s about 100 presents already wrapped up under the Christmas tree waiting for him because he also missed his birthday on September 6.
 
“I just want him home as soon as possible.”

Mr Sakaraglu, who has appeared on Britain’s Got Talent under the stage name of Ali Baba, has previously accused Ms Khansia of being an unfit mother.
 
He had claimed he was acting in the best interests of his son and the stress of the case had made him ill.
 
But Ms Khansia admitted she had been jailed for six months in 2005 after buying a house with laundered drugs money. But she said she had since turned her life around and had told Mr Sakaraglu when she met him.
 
The couple married in 2008 after meeting on holiday a year before. They separated shortly after Amani’s birth in 2009, but Ms Khansia regularly took her son to Turkey so he could see his family.
 
After he was taken, Anisa launched a campaign for Amani to be returned to her, which included an awareness-raising walk and protest in Blackburn and a Facebook page supported by 1,750 people.
 
Ms Khansia’s lawyers used the Hague Convention treaty in a Marmaris court last week to argue that Amani should be returned to Britain after Mr Sakaraglu declined to hand the child back voluntarily.
 
Internationally recognised, the Hague Convention on Child Abduction regulates which country has the jurisdiction to decide where the child should live, namely the country where the child was habitually resident.
 
Ms Khansia, a secretary, said: “I went to court in his country and I still won. All the proof is now out that I was in the right and he was in the wrong. The law is on my side.
 
“But I was disappointed that Mehmet didn’t bring Amani to the court like he said he would, which just shows me he never was prepared to let me see my son.
 
“I would not wish this on my worst enemy. My life has been on hold since July and now I’m looking forward to getting Amani back to nursery and to normality.
 
“Any future custody battles will be conducted in UK courts, but I’m not even thinking about that now.”
 

[SageDad]

I'm glad to see the Hague Convention work.  I don't support child abduction as any sort of "legal strategy" even though, from a dispassionate legal perspective that ignores the harm done to children, it is undoubtedly a very effective legal technique for mothers (even if, technically, illegal.)

This UK mother's story has a lot of the typical elements...

"Anisa Khansia said she has endured a “living hell” since her estranged Turkish husband refused to hand back two-year-old Amani in July."

“All of my family is hoping it’s before Christmas, but I’m trying not to get too excited because there is still red tape.
 
“There’s about 100 presents already wrapped up under the Christmas tree waiting for him because he also missed his birthday on September 6.
 
“I just want him home as soon as possible.”

I find it interesting that, even though "Ms Khansia admitted she had been jailed for six months in 2005 after buying a house with laundered drugs money" she has won a Hague Convention case and received substantial, and sympathetic, media attention.

Even with Turkey being a Muslim country that is supposed to favor fathers, and with the mother having been convicted of being part of some large scale drug operation, the Hague Convention actually worked... sort of.  I won't be surprised to see this decision appealed for a year or two longer. 

To paraphrase Adair Dyer, the Hague Convention actually works, as both a deterrent, and to return children when fathers abduct them.  When mothers abduct they aren't worried about the Hague Convention because it almost never works to return the children.

Someday, perhaps, organizations like the Office of Children's Issues will release data on the number of abducted children returned broken down by the sex of the abducting parent so that the difference in the way these cases are handled, on all levels, is no longer hidden behind gender neutral numbers.  One thing is certain though, if mothers were never getting their children back and fathers were, the numbers would call that out clearly and it would be a major issue rather than an invisible problem that can only be glimpsed by carefully reading between the lines.

[forthelost]

I know of one case where a boy was taken to Turkey by his mother and returned to his dad in the US via the Hague.

[SageDad]

I know of one case where a boy was taken to Turkey by his mother and returned to his dad in the US via the Hague.

I know of lots of anecdotal cases too, but exceptions only make the rule.  

I doubt the US dad in that case spent 6 months in jail for buying a home with laundered drug money a few years before the child was born though.  

More to the point, if that father had done so he wouldn't have been out of prison in time to have a child a few years later.  The single greatest factor influencing the length of jail sentence that a criminal will receive in the US upon being convicted is the sex of the offender.  This factor transcends all others including, race, income, religion and sexuality.  

In Britain the Ministry of Justice "welcomes" a report from its Women's Justice Task Force that recommends that incarceration be eliminated altogether.. for women -- who can't really be criminals, but instead are always victims who need treatment.  This when, just months prior, British judges were recommended to issue lighter sentences to women offenders, regardless of their offense. That recommendation was issued by the Equal Treatment Bench Book, published by the Judicial Studies Board.  Yes, you read the correctly, the "Equal Treatment" book explicitly calls for unequal treatment in the name of "equality" (pretty typical actually if you really get down to it.)