America's lost children, kidnapped abroad

WASHINGTON – Each year, about a thousand American children are the victims of international child abduction, according to Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J.

Smith, who is chairman of the House Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations, led a hearing last week to find out how the U.S. State Department is enforcing the "Sean and David Goldman Child Abduction Prevention and Return Act," which was sponsored by the congressman and signed into law by President Barack Obama in August.

The federal law requires the Secretary of State to submit to Congress each year a report on which nations engage in a pattern of noncompliance in cases of child abduction. The legislation also allows for sanctions to be imposed against countries that persistently fail to follow either the Hague Abduction Conventions, a 1980 international treaty that bars parents from fleeing to other countries until custody is decided, or similar agreements the United States has with countries that are not part of that treaty.

The statute is named for David Goldman and his son Sean, who was returned to his father from the boy's maternal grandparents in Brazil, on Christmas Eve in 2009, after Smith intervened in the matter.

Less than half of all children abducted to other countries each year ever come home again, Smith said, who spoke before a committee room populated by parents of children who were spirited away to other countries, usually by the other parent who may be a naturalized U.S. citizen or foreign national.

"Most of the left-behind parents in the audience today have not seen their children in years and know all too well the financial, legal, cultural, and linguistic obstacles to bringing their children home from a foreign country," Smith said in his public remarks at the hearing on Wednesday.

Bindu Philips, a Plainsboro mother, whose twin sons were abducted to India, testified at the hearing.

"My world and that of my innocent children was violently disrupted by my ex-husband, Sunil Jacob in December of 2008, when he orchestrated the kidnapping of the children during a vacation to India," Philips told the committee. "I would note that the children, my ex-husband and I are American citizens and that the children were born in America, which is the only nation they identified with as home."

A state Superior Court judge in New Jersey awarded Philips sole custody of the couple's children in 2009. Nevertheless, she noted that she has not been able to see or have contact with her children since their father decided to keep them with him in India.

"My children have lost six years of their mother's love and care and I have lost six years of my children's childhood that neither of us can ever get back," she said. "I have put everything I have into my mission to be reunited with my children."

Ambassador Susan S. Jacobs, special advisor for Children's Issues in the Bureau of Consular Affairs at the State Department, testified that of the more than 900 cases of international child abductions in 2014, 260 have been returned or resolved.

Smith has held multiple hearings on the plights of American children who have been abducted to Brazil, India, Japan, Egypt, Russia, and even close allies such as the United Kingdom, according to his office.

Erik Larsen: 732-682-9359 or elarsen@app.com