Legal disputes over children whose parents live in different countries increased 40 percent in 2012 on the previous year, according to an office set up to assist with cases in England and Wales.
The Office of the Head of International Family Justice for England and Wales handled 253 such cases, including international child abductions, in 2012, up from 180 in 2011 and 92 in 2010, it said in a report released Wednesday.
Mother Naomi Button said her daughter Elsa — now six — was taken by her Egyptian father from a holiday apartment there in 2011 and that she still does not know where her daughter is.
“When I stepped out on the balcony to take a call from a family member, he took Elsa. I came back and they were gone,” she told the BBC on Wednesday.
“Until we identify the location (of Elsa and her father) we can’t serve the custody order that I have.”
The unit said a judicial agreement with Egypt on child abduction had “not borne… fruit”.
While the numbers of cases like Elsa’s remain relatively small, Judge Mathew Alexander Thorpe, who heads the unit, warned in a preface written with lawyer Edward Bennett that everyone involved in family law would need to learn to think internationally. In the unit’s first year, 2005, it handled just three cases.
Thorpe said the causes of the increase were “globalisation, increasing movement of persons across borders, and the ever rising number of family units which are truly international”.
Some 127 of the 2012 cases involved European countries, but the office also dealt with countries around the world from Saudi Arabia to New Zealand, it said.
In one case, “a mother involved in care proceedings relating to her children wrongfully removed them to France where she hid with them on a waterlogged caravan site where they did not attend school, were not registered with a doctor, and the mother had no income,” the unit said.
It was able to involve French social services to secure the children’s safe return home.
Thorpe’s office acts as a help desk for judges and lawyers in Britain or overseas facing delays or blocks to cases because two countries’ legal systems are involved.
Sharp rise in international family disputes
