Alison, you called the court unbiased. Ten years of beatings. The court set the evidence aside. The child stood in the witness box and begged not to be sent back. You say the convention provides plenty of defences. A defence that requires a child to beg the court is not a defence.
The 1980 Hague Convention requires signatory nations to return children removed across a border within six weeks so that courts in the home country can decide their futures. Roughly 500 applications for the return of a child are filed each year in England and Wales. Between 10 and 20 percent of those children end up separated from their primary carer by court order. The Ministry of Justice is now reviewing every High Court Hague case heard across 2024 and 2025. The first review of its kind anywhere in the world. No timeline has been given.
Claire lived in the United States with an abusive partner and their two small children for more than a decade. “We were all terrified of him,” she told the Guardian. “I was in near-constant fear for my life.” She escaped. She got her children on a plane back to the UK. Three months in hiding. She applied for benefits. Within a day, the police were at her door with a Hague Convention summons and a hearing nine days out. Claire spent everything she had on a barrister. Her evidence of domestic abuse was ignored. She won only because the judge permitted her eldest child — weeks short of the fourteen years at which UK courts will hear a child’s own testimony — to speak in the witness box. The child told the court she did not want to be sent back.
Dr Adrienne Barnett of Right to Equality said there was a “dearth of basic data.” Nobody knows what percentage of returning parents are mothers. Nobody knows how many children are returned without their parent. Nobody knows how many told the court they did not want to go. Ruth Dineen of the Filia Hague Mothers campaign said the circumstances have changed substantially since 1980. There are far more cross-national relationships. There is a far greater understanding of domestic abuse and coercive control. The convention has not moved.
Alison, you are the chief executive of Reunite. You told the Guardian the convention provides “a clear, unbiased court process” with “plenty of defences and opportunities for parents under the convention in England and Wales, where legal aid is available where there is domestic abuse.”
Your mouth forms the word “unbiased” and there is a taste under your tongue — copper, the taste of a word that does not match the record. The mother’s evidence was ten years of beatings. The court heard it and set it aside. You call that unbiased.
Your throat tightens around the word “defences.” Claire spent every penny she owned on a barrister. The barrister found a crack in the age threshold and pushed a child’s voice through it. That was not a defence the convention provided. That was a crack the convention left. Every mother who could not find the crack — every mother who could not afford the barrister — the court returned their children and did not record their names. You say the convention provides plenty of defences. A pressure builds behind your sternum — flat, steady, pressing inward — because you know what “plenty” means when the means-and-merits test bars the door and the mother stands alone in the High Court with no advocate and no emotional support and evidence the court was not built to hear.
Roz Osborne of Globalarrk told the Guardian that victims do not have access to equal legal support. Legal aid inequalities cause delay or no representation at all. Victims have no emotional support in the High Court, no domestic abuse support worker. Summary hearings do not allow sufficient understanding of the risks. Children are not acknowledged as victims in their own right.
Alison, you said legal aid is available. The mother applies. The means-and-merits test. She does not meet it. She walks into the High Court without a barrister. She has evidence of ten years of beatings. The court ignores it. You said legal aid was available. Your jaw locks around the word “available” because what you mean is that the box on the form exists. What you mean is that the application can be filed. What you mean is not that the mother who was beaten for a decade will receive it.
Lisa Smart, the Liberal Democrat MP, told the Guardian what the convention does to a parent who escapes violence: it treats her as a wrongdoer. The mother who fled is the abductor. The father she fled from is the left-behind parent. The convention’s vocabulary has no word for what she actually is.
You, Alison, are the woman who makes this presentable. Without you, the convention is a statute signed in 1980 by people who did not ask why the mother left. With you, it is a moral act. You lend it your name, your title, your authority. You tell a newspaper the court is clear and unbiased while a child begs the judge not to send her back. You make it sound like protection. It is not protection. It is a return order that treats a mother’s flight from violence as a crime against a father’s custody.
Alison, put your own child in it. Picture your child standing in the High Court. Picture your child’s evidence set aside. Picture your child weeks short of the age when the court would listen, pushed into the witness box because a barrister found a crack. Picture your child telling the judge she does not want to be sent back. Picture the judge issuing the return order, because the convention does not ask why the mother left. Picture your child on the plane. Picture the man waiting at the other end. That is what you defend. That is what you called unbiased.
A Home Office spokesperson said the research is intended “to provide robust evidence to inform possible future government policy on the effective operation of the convention.” Effective operation. The convention has been operating since 1980. It has been operating every time a High Court judge issued a return order for a child who had escaped a violent household. It has been operating every time a mother walked into the courtroom with evidence the court was not built to hear. You called these cases “complex and sensitive.” The mother’s terror is not complex. The child’s testimony is not complex. The beatings are not complex. The only complexity is the complexity you need to keep doing it.
“You load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them.” Luke 11:46