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Parental Abduction Recovery, Enforcement, and Network Training Act
Abducted Children Sacrificed in the Name of Diplomacy
Landover, MD 20785 March 21 2008
By Brett Weed & Larry Synclair, Children's Rights Council of Japan
American parents with children illegally taken to foreign countries are angry about the U.S. State Department’s annual report to Congress about human rights in other countries. The condemnation centers on the State Department’s support of countries known to allow international parental abduction.
The Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2007 was presented by the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. The report is required under the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 and based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of December 10, 1948. International parental abduction is also recognized as a federal crime in the United States; but left behind parents of abducted children abroad claim the Country Reports remain incomplete and in violation of law by not identifying countries permitting child abduction and retention such as Japan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Philippines and Taiwan.
Left-behind parents such as Paul Toland, Patrick Braden, Walter Benda, Brett Weed and others have called for the inclusion of parental abduction as a violation of human rights practices pertaining to countries that harbor parentally abducted children. The State Department has ignored this request in the name of diplomacy.
Walter Benda, co-founder of Children's Rights Council of Japan, the first foreign chapter of the nonprofit Landover, Maryland-based global Children’s Rights Council, is pressing for Congressional inquiries about the State Department’s lack of action to address international parental abductions in its annual Country Reports and its failure to honor the spirit of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Missing children organizations and hundreds of parents of abducted children are calling for support of proposed legislation known as the Parental Abduction Recovery, Enforcement, and Network Training Act. The PARENT Act would replace the State Department’s Office of Children’s Issues with a highly trained staff within the U.S. Justice Department. This would eliminate the inherent conflict of interest that exists between the State Department’s diplomatic interests and the recovery efforts of our most vulnerable citizens, our children.
To participate, see: http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/support-the-parent-act.html.
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The authors do not require any compensation for publication, we only want it published. Please forward any monetary donations for use/publication of this article to the Children’s Rights Council http://www.crckids.org/.
For more information, please contact:
Brett Weed e-mail: bweed6@hotmail.com
Walter Benda e-mail: crcjapan@yahoo.com
David Levy: dlevy@crckids.org
David L. Levy, J.D. (dlevy@crckids.org)
Chief Executive Officer
Children's Rights Council
8181 Professional Place, suite 240
Landover, MD 20785
Child Seek Network
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David L. Levy, J.D Email
Runaways
Family abductions
Lost, injured or otherwise missing children
Nonfamily abductions (in these cases, the child is at greatest risk of injury or death).
How serious are family abductions?
All cases of child abduction must be taken very seriously. In most family-related cases, children are told that the left-behind parent doesn’t want or love them. These children may live the life of a fugitive, always on the run with the noncustodial parent, isolated from family, friends, home, and school.
THE P.A.R.E.N.T. ACT
