Support the Parental Abduction Recovery, Enforcement, and Network Training (PARENT) Act

July 17, 2007 - Newest version of PARENT Act with comments

July 12, 2007 - Previous version of PARENT Act

June 14, 2007 - Previous draft version of the PARENT Act with comments

The Japan Children's Rights Network supports this legislation and urges you to do so also.

Larry Sinclair, a parent whose child was abducted to Russia has created a legislative proposal to make the U.S. government more responsive with respect to internationally abducted children. Larry is also the co-author of the California Synclair-Cannon Child Abduction Prevention Act of 2002 (Family Code 3048) which now brings family court judges' attention to indications that one parent might abduct the child involved.

The Parental Abduction Recovery, Enforcement, and Network Training (PARENT) Act is designed to fix enforcement issues that arise from the fact that international child abduction cases are shared among the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Justice Department, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).  As described in comments in the draft version of the PARENT Act

"The U.S. State Department’s Office of Children’s Issues (OCI), responsible for handling international child abduction cases, has an appalling record of resolving international parental abduction cases. Often their diplomatic tactics are passive and unreliable; strategies to encourage or press foreign governments to return abducted American children have proven to be ineffective. The result has been hundreds of parents of abducted children vehemently expressing their shock and anger about this dysfunctional State Department office. Members of Congress have also stated their displeasure about OCI’s failures."

It should not be surprising that the US State Department would view applying pressure to foreign governments to compel their own citizens to return abducted children as a goal of secondary importance to other national initiatives, such as international support for the Iraq War, preserving relations with major oil exporting countries or resolving whatever the political crisis of the may be.  Personal experiences of numerous left-behind parents reflect an apparent lack of desire by OCI to support initiatives that could conflict with these other goals.

The PARENT act aims to legislatively correct this and other deficiencies in the way crimes of parental abduction are handled at the US federal level.  In particular it proposes:

• Expands the conditions under which an abduction is considered a crime punishable in the US.

• Recognizes that parental abduction is a form of child abuse.

• Transfers responsibility for compiling information about international child abduction from the State Department OCI to the NCMEC.

• Establishes a "Child Abduction Recovery and Enforcement" division within the Justice Department responsible for educating and providing information to State and Federal law enforcement agencies, acting as the Central Authority under the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction and ensuring prosecution of international parental abductors.

• Transfers various international child abduction related responsibilities from the Secretary of State and the State Department U.S. State Department’s Office of Children’s Issues to the US Attorney General and the newly created  Justice Department's Child Abduction Recovery and Enforcement division.

• Establishes a committee that meets regularly to designate countries as non-compliant with the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction.

• Makes mandatory, the federal prosecution of an international child abductor who has fled to a country that has not signed or is non-compliant with the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction.

• Allows freezing the assets of a parental abductor.

• Makes mandatory, the filing of a request with Interpol to flag the abducting parent’s passport and the abducted child’s name.

• Makes mandatory, the denial of US visas to relatives and friends of an international child abductor or anyone else with knowledge of the whereabouts of an internationally abducted child.

• Removes the statute of limitation on crimes of parental abduction, in particular, preventing cases from being closed when the abducted child becomes an adult.

• Removes the maximum three year period of incarceration for crimes of parental abduction.

Click here for the full text of the PARENT Act.

What you can do to help

Larry is actively lobbying California's Senator Dianne Feinstein to introduce this bill to the US Senate.  If you live in California, you can send a letter to Senator Feinstein telling her that you would also like to see this bill introduced.  We have two sample letters to Senator Feinstein available for download and modification:

Sample letter #1 to Senator Feinstein - perhaps most appropriate for a California resident

Sample letter #2 to Senator Feinstein - perhaps better if you are not a California resident, but good for a California resident anyways

If you live outside California, please contact your local congressman and senators, give them a copy of the full text of this proposed law, and ask for their immediate and full support.  You can easily modify either of the above two letters for your own representative also.  If you send or fax one of these, please either mail a scanned copy of the letter to Larry Synclair (email below) or fax him a copy also at PAREN 210 PAREN 8 5 8 DASH 38 79.

For further information

If you have further questions, you can contact the author, Larry Sinclair, directly.

Email: lsynclair AT yahoo. com

Website: http://www.geocities.com/lsynclair/index.html

Combined with the new uniform state law against child abduction that are moving thru state legislatures now, the US would start to have a reasonable legal infrastructure in place not only to go after parental abductors but to aggressively prevent abductions in the first place.