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As the nation awaited the outcome of the presidential election, the hundreds of cases ofinternational parental kidnappings once again were placed on the back burner – butperhaps not for long. Should Texas Gov. George W. Bush become president, therewould be a candle of hope for thousands of parents longing to be reunited with theirchildren. They know that the Bush campaign gave a sympathetic hearing to this issue,which has been all but ignored under the Clinton/Gore administration, according tohigh-level sources working with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Childrenon international parental kidnapping cases.

A ranking source working on the international cases says that Vice President Al Gore

and his wife, Tipper, have taken zero interest in these tragic children, whereas Bush

wants to get actively involved. “I’m surprised about Tipper, but I’m afraid Bush would be

better for us,” says the source, who also praised Democratic New York senator-elect

Hillary Rodham Clinton for calling it a human-rights issue even though her husband

failed to support the remarks.

Meanwhile, parents continue to engage in a war of words with countries reluctant to

follow the Hague Convention, a multilateral agreement designed to return abducted

children to their custodial parent. Last year the complaints of victimized parents and

Insight’s coverage of the issue (see Insightmag.com under “Back Issues” and

“Investigative Stories”) prompted congressional hearings, changes in a Justice

Department task-force report and two General Accounting Office (GAO) reports outlining

some of the problems. Certainly the congressional hearings alone provided sufficient

evidence for Congress and the nation to see how completely the Hague Convention has

failed.

While the GAO reports at least raised the issue, they failed to provide the texture and

context of the story. Even the most recent GAO investigation, triggered by Senate Foreign

Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms of North Carolina, was another

incomplete probe. Published as Status of U.S. Parental Child Abductions to Germany,

Sweden and Austria, it failed to include interviews with suffering parents anxious to detail

how and why the system is not working.

Tom Johnson, a State Department attorney whose daughter, Amanda, has been captive

in Sweden for the last five years, put it this way: “As you can see, the failure to talk to the

only people who really know the situation in each country [i.e., the left-behind parents]

resulted in a fairly worthless report and the omission of some leading cases. Instead,

the GAO relied exclusively on the people they were supposed to be investigating – the

Office of Children’s Issues at the State Department.”

Johnson meanwhile has caught the attention of House International Relations

Committee Chairman Benjamin Gilman of New York, who has begun a personal

crusade to get the State Department to make these cases a top priority. Gilman

requested an additional GAO report, and parents remain hopeful that the State

Department’s annual report on Hague Convention compliance would reveal a change of

course. The report is supposed to warn and educate U.S. courts, lawyers and parents

on this issue, but it hasn’t done that in the past.

So it comes as no surprise that when the State Department released its most recent

Hague Convention compliance report it was met with disdain by Gilman. After reviewing

the report, Compliance with the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International

Child Abduction, Gilman slammed the State Department for the callous way in which it

classified cases as “resolved,” and in particular for moving abusing countries, including

Germany and Sweden, from the noncompliant category to partially compliant.

Gilman, like so many of the grieving left-behind parents, says he is astonished at the

State Department calling cases “resolved and therefore closed,” when this in fact

“presents an inaccurate picture of the level of compliance by all signatories of the Hague

Convention.” In other words, as soon as a foreign country denies a U.S. parent’s Hague

application, the State Department regards the case as resolved and no longer active.

Even more upset with this report was Rep. Nick Lampson, D-Texas, chairman of the

House Caucus onMissing and Exploited Children, who says the State Department report

not only is inaccurate but violates the statutory reporting requirements. Lampson calls

the report “unacceptable to Congress.” He told Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright

that it is nearly as useless as the 1999 report, which claimed there were 58 “unresolved”

cases after 18 months but failed to identify even one offending country.

While the State Department may indeed have violated the statutory reporting

requirement, any penalty apparently will have to wait until the presidential election is

sorted out. Under a Bush administration, someone might get fired. In the meantime,

Helms is considering whether to force the State Department to rewrite the report.

The senator is well aware that the numbers the State Department has supplied to

Congress don’t add up and never did. Should Bush become president, he certainly will

recognize it as “fuzzy math.” For example, while the United States is returning children in

90 percent of the Hague Convention cases filed here, according to the GAO, only 24

percent of overall abductions from the United States result in a return or even some form

of visitation abroad, which means actual returns are well below 20 percent.

Also being fuzzed by the State Department is the exact number of children missing

abroad, notes Johnson. “Congress rightly ridiculed the department’s effort to claim that

there were only 58 outgoing Hague cases unresolved after 18 months,” Johnson wrote

in a terse letter to Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs Mary Ryan, who simply

ignored the matter. “The Department’s bad faith is especially evident with regard to this

point, since Congress itself estimated there to be 10,000 abducted American children

abroad when it passed the 1993 International Parental Kidnapping Crimes Act.

Congress knows that even the State Department admits to 500 to 1000 new cases

annually, and Congress knows that the National Center’s estimate is up to 17,000 per

year. These numbers include both Hague and non-Hague cases, but nevertheless

indicate the extent of the Department’s attempt to mislead Congress with a report of only

58 unresolved cases.”

The outraged Johnson continued, “Few, if any, frivolous Hague applications are filed by

American parents. Real American children are missing from real American parents,

families and homes. For the American children and left-behind parents in such cases,

they are not suddenly resolved when a foreign country makes a final decision to deny a

return application. These are ongoing, continuing tragedies for the American citizens

involved, and you must tell Congress about each such case where an abducted/retained

American child has not come home.”

The Hague report comes on the heels of the second International Forum on Parental

Child Abduction hosted in Alexandria, Va., by the National Center for Missing and

Exploited Children to address shortcomings of countries party to the Hague Convention.

Representatives of seven foreign countries attended, but not much was accomplished.

There was considerable tension at the forum when officials of Germany spoke about

how they punish violators, despite the notorious fact that Germany routinely awards

custody to German citizens regardless of court rulings in the country from which a child

has been abducted. But the group managed to agree to develop a best-practice

standard to be discussed at the next meeting, to be held in The Hague in the spring of

2001. The British ambassador’s wife, Lady Catherine Meyer, cochaired the conference

and called it a start – with the hope of better things to come (see “Lady Meyer Struggles

for Parental Rights,” Oct. 2).

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We, the Ambassadors to Japan of Australia, France, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States, the Charges d’Affaires a.i. of Canada and Spain and the Deputy Head of Mission of Italy, called on Japan’s Minister of Foreign Affairs today to submit our concerns over the increase of international parental abduction cases involving Japan and affecting our nationals, and to urge Japan to sign the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction (“the Convention”).

The Convention seeks to protect children from the harmful effects of their wrongful removal or retention across international borders, which can be a tragedy for all concerned. The Convention further establishes procedures to ensure the prompt return of children to the State of their habitual residence when wrongfully removed or retained. It also secures protection for rights of access to both parents to their children. To date, over 80 countries have acceded to the Convention, including the eight countries which jointly carried out today’s demarche.

Japan is the only G-7 nation that has not signed the Convention. Currently the left-behind parents of children abducted to or from Japan have little hope of having their children returned and encounter great difficulties in obtaining access to their children and exercising their parental rights and responsibilities.

In our meeting with Japan’s Foreign Minister Okada, we reiterated that we place the highest priority on the welfare of children who have been the victims of international parental child abduction, and stressed that the children should grow up with access to both parents. We signalled our encouragement at recent positive initiatives by the Government of Japan, such as the establishment of the Division for Issues Related to Child Custody within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, at the same time repeating calls for Japan to accede to the Convention, which would also benefit left-behind parents of Japanese origin. We also urged Japan to identify and implement interim measures to enable parents who are separated from their children to maintain contact with them and ensure visitation rights, and to establish a framework for resolution of current child abduction cases.

Japan is an important friend and partner for each of our countries, and we share many values. We believe this can and should serve as the basis for developing solutions now to all cases of parental child abduction in Japan. In common with our demarche to Justice Minister Chiba on October 16, 2009, we extended an offer to Foreign Minister Okada to continue to work closely and in a positive manner with the Japanese government on this critical issue

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Japan. Kidnapper parent/mother suffers from severe depression and bipolar disorder and has arrest record for domestic violence.

Date of Birth: August 5, 2006Date Child Kidnapped from U.S.: December 15, 2008Current Condition of Child: Wayne Sawyer is now known exclusively in Japan as Kosaku Mori. He is subject to classic parental alienation tactics by the kidnappers. Kidnappershave stated they made the false statement to Wayne, at age two and a half, that his father does not want to see him anymore. Wayne is a very brightchild but suffers from a speech delay problem, which his Los Angeles pediatrician diagnosed in late 2008. Father enrolled Wayne in speech therapyprogram in Los Angeles prior to kidnapping. Mother confi rmed in writing that speech delay problem is not being tended to in Japan. Wayne has redhair, an extreme rarity in Japan, which targets him for bullying. Evidence indicates this child is being emotionally, mentally and physically abused inJapan. Kidnapper parent/mother suffers from severe depression and bipolar disorder and has arrest record for domestic violence.Case Summary: On December 15, 2008, Kyoko Sawyer a/k/a Kyoko Mori, violated Los Angeles Superior Court custody, travel ban and passport surrender ordersand kidnapped Wayne Sawyer from Los Angeles, traveling to Japan on a JAL fl ight. Aware of the Superior Court’s orders, Vice Consul Yamamotoof the Los Angeles Japanese Consulate and his assistant Suzuki, in 2007 and 2008, gave multiple verbal assurances (always refusing to put them inwriting) to Wayne’s father, Scott Sawyer, and his attorney (with a translator present) that the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs had placed arestriction on issuing Wayne, a U.S. citizen from birth, a Japanese passport. In a routine practice, Japanese offi cials stationed in America issued aJapanese passport to Wayne under a false Japanese name and allowed Kyoko Sawyer to travel out of the United States using a second passport witha different identifi cation number than the one she surrendered to the Los Angeles Superior Court.Upon arriving in Japan, the kidnapper informed Scott Sawyer by email that he could only see Wayne via internet camera in exchange for a monthlyextortion payment of $3,000.

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Current Condition of Child: Unknown

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Date of Birth: 1-5-2006 / 8-2-2007
Date Child Kidnapped from U.S.: Dec 6th 2008Current Condition of Child: UnknownCase

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Current Condition of Child: Unknown

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