International abductions: Canada has to move faster when foreign courts don’t deliver justice GlobeDebate
Elena Danilina is shown with her daughters, Maria Squalli and Rita Squalli, in Toronto in April, 2015. Ms. Danilina was separated from her children in 2018 when their father, Jay Squalli, took them on a plane to the United Arab Emirates, having claimed they were going to Morocco. Their case is one of several that illustrates the complex and flawed web of policies intended to remedy international child abductions.At the time, I didn’t feel lucky.
That’s where Elena Danilina’s daughters have been for the past year. On April 7, 2018, as the 40-year-old mother was climbing the 1,776 steps of the CN tower, Ms. Danilina had a sinking feeling. She had planned to do the climb with her 10-year-old daughter Rita. But the day before, Rita and her younger sister Maria had boarded a plane with their father bound for his native Morocco, to pay an urgent visit to his ailing mother. Or so he said.
Four days after the girls had left the country, Ms. Danilina reached her older daughter on Skype. Rita told her mother that they had not travelled to Morocco, but rather to Sharjah. Mr. Squalli entered the picture to say, “This is their home now,” adding that if Ms. Danilina wanted to discuss the matter, she would have to come there. The next day, Ms. Danilina hired a lawyer.points out, the best result of a child abduction is a voluntary return, in which the abducting parent relents.
Nonetheless, Ms. Danilina’s lawyer filed an urgent motion at an Ontario Superior Court, applying for a custody and return order that was issued the following day. And then a waiting game began, premised on the hope that Mr. Squalli would eventually travel with the children to Morocco, a Hague Convention member since 2010.
“It all started well,” says Reda Oulamine, Ms. Danilina’s Moroccan lawyer, who accompanied his client to the airport that day. But as Ms. Danilina was checking in, Mr. Squalli phoned and asked her to come outside. “Then a movie started,” says Mr. Oulamine, describing a scene “unlike anything I have ever seen before.” Both girls were screaming and crying, refusing to enter the airport.
Maria Squalli at a Casablanca McDonald's in March, 2019, where she celebrated her seventh birthday. Ms. Danilina brought her daughter doughnuts and a Barbie doll.As international family-law expert Mr. Lowe explains, initiatives by some states to build an enforcement provision into the Convention have been quashed by others. Instead, the Convention offers a “good practice guide” on enforcement: instructive but toothless.
Ms. Danilina’s primary government contact is a case worker at the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney-General. She’s also in touch with one of the two counsel that handle all Hague Convention files that Ontario receives , a legal counsel at the federal Ministry of Justice, and case workers at her local MP’s office, at the “family unit” of Global Affairs’ headquarters in Ottawa and at the Canadian embassy in Morocco. Ms.
Toronto-based family lawyer Michael Stangarone, who has handled more than a hundred child-abduction cases, including a recent uptick in international ones, says he has sometimes had to wait a month to have a motion heard in an Ontario court and has watched cases that should be settled in one sitting turn into multiday trials. He would like to see family courts consistently flag and expedite all child-abduction cases.
The Prime Minister committed to keeping her file on his desk until her children were brought home. Presumably, it’s still there. Global Affairs won’t comment on specific cases, but spokesman Richard Walker calls child abductions “one of the most difficult consular situations that the Government of Canada responds to.” That response needs to be re-examined. Twenty years ago, in April, 1998, the then-standing committee on foreign affairs and international trade presented a report titled International Child Abduction: Issues for Reform.
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