Introduction and key themes

Abstract

International child abduction involves one parent taking their child to a different country without the other parent's, or a court's, consent for that purpose, or not allowing the child to return home at the end of a trip away. This striking form of interparental conflict means the child may now be in a country with which they may have no, or only limited, familiarity. This may be experienced as a relatively benign event, or even offer the benefit of reconnection with wider family members and/or escape from an abusive left-behind parent. Mostly, though, the abduction of a child by a parent to an overseas destination has a profoundly distressing and enduring impact on the child's wellbeing and identity, and the nature and quality of their intrafamilial relationships.'International child abduction' was not, however, a recognised legal concept when this issue first properly emerged during the 1970s as a global phenomenon of immense social importance. 1 Then termed 'legal kidnapping' or 'childnapping', it faced the problem of being a topic that 'could not be defined, or even adequately identified'. 2 Nevertheless, there was recognition of its detrimental effects, including 'the risk of harm to the child and the certainty of distress to the parent from whom the child had been taken'. 3 Escalating international mobility, coupled with the growth in cross-border relationships and children born within them, and rising separation/divorce rates, further fuelled the need for action. Difficulty in securing the child's return from a foreign land also meant that, at an international level, the issue was beginning to capture the attention of lawyers, courts, governments and the public. Locating the abducted child and bringing an application for custody abroad was complicated, expensive, lengthy and exhausting, with no certainty of outcome due to the lack of satisfactory legal remedies and absence of mutual enforcement mechanisms between States. There was also concern that the courts, laws and values of the two countries involved were being unhelpfully pitted against one another. 4 Similarly, complex inter-State issues could arise domestically when, for example, a child's abduction involved two jurisdictions within a large country like the United States (US).There had been recognition of the need for an international approach to parental kidnapping since the end of World War Two, but it was during the 1970s that serious new initiatives 1