US parents separated from their children by foreign authorities pleaded Wednesday to Congress to make custody battles a diplomatic priority with nations such as Japan and Brazil.
Japan has come under growing US criticism for its strict rules in custody disputes. Japanese courts generally award children to only one parent, usually the mother, and almost never grant custody to foreign parents.
Paul Toland, a navy commander who was living in Japan, said his estranged Japanese-born wife seized their daughter Erika in 2003 and has since denied him access. US lawmakers called it a kidnapping, but Japanese courts sided with the mother.
"Nothing is more important and deep-seated in this world than a parent's love for his child," Toland told the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, a congressional panel.
"Equally important is a society's responsibility to ensure that their most vulnerable citizens, their children, have the opportunity to know and love their parents," he said.
David Goldman, whose nine-year-old son is the focus of a high-profile custody battle in Brazil, called for Congress to press on the Hague Convention, which obliges nations to return a child wrongfully kept there to their country of habitual residence.
Goldman called for the US government to step up its response so that "other countries learn there are serious consequences for refusing to return abducted American children."
The United States and Brazil have signed the 1980 Hague Convention, along with most Western and Latin American nations. Japan, along with most nations in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, shun the treaty.
Representative Christopher Smith, who convened the hearing, has called for the United States to appoint an ambassador-at-large on custody disputes and impose penalties on countries that do not cooperate in returning children.
"The present state of affairs is unconscionable and must change," said Smith, a Republican who like Goldman is from New Jersey.
Goldman's son Sean was born in the United States in 2000, and when he was four years old traveled to Brazil with his Brazilian mother for what was supposed to be a two-week vacation.
However the mother stayed in Brazil, divorced Goldman, remarried, then died in childbirth last year.
Sean's Brazilian stepfather has fought to keep him, saying he has integrated into Brazilian life.
Copyright 2009 AFP American Edition
