Excerpt from US Congressional Hearings

WALTER PAUL BENDA,

MAX MEADOWS, VIRGINIA,

Hon. JESSE HELMS,

DEAR SENATOR HELMS: My family and I were greatly excited to receive your September  21 letter advising us of the special hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on October 1 regarding international child abduction. Being victims of this, we have felt extremely frustrated by the indifference shown by our government, as well as foreign governments, about this problem. We are deeply appreciative that someone of your stature finally has the courage and compassion to publicly address this problem.

I apologize in advance that much of my letter sounds negative, but please understand that I and my family have been emotionally and financially drained by the abduction of my two American born daughters, Mari and Ema, for over 3 years now. We have had no direct contact with them whatsoever since the day they were abducted. We still do not know their whereabouts, even though my wife, Yoko Mizuno Benda, was indicted for international parental kidnapping over 2 years ago, and supposedly is being searched for by the FBI, Interpol, and our State Department.

Here is a quick round-down of my experiences:

1.) Japanese Police: I have personally gone, usually with my own paid interpreter, to various Japanese police departments in Tokyo and Chiba about half a dozen times during the past 3 years. Each of these experiences has been most unpleasant, and there has never been any concrete help of any kind offered. They have ridiculed me, ignored factual evidence I have presented to them, spoken behind my back with my interpreter (trying to get her to just make me leave), and basically been rude and uncooperative. From my experience, the Japanese police are lazy, insensitive, ignorant, and racist. They will not lift a finger to help foreigners in these kinds of cases.

2.) Japanese courts: I been involved in Japanese court proceedings in family court, district court, high court, and in the very near future, I will be pleading my case before the Japanese Supreme Court. From my experiences, these courts do not follow standard legal procedures that would be expected in the U.S. court system. For example, despite the fact that I was properly communicating with the Japanese family court, keeping them informed of my whereabouts, they never acknowledged any of my communications, and did not keep me notified of hearings that were scheduled. As a consequence, my wife’s Japanese attorney rammed my case through family court without me being given any opportunities for mediation which are guaranteed under Japanese law before a case can be heard in district court. I definitely feel I received discriminatory treatment from the family court because I was a foreigner and they felt they could circumvent my legal rights without me being able to do anything about it. Many legal irregularities also occurred at the district court level. At the first hearing, for which I had to take off over one week from work, and spend lots of my personal funds to travel to Japan, my wife and her attorney showed up one hour late. The judge said nothing about this, and let them present their side during the remaining 30 minutes, without giving my Japanese lawyer an opportunity to say anything. When my Japanese lawyer suddenly resigned 2 weeks before the next hearing, the judge refused to reschedule the hearing, even though I made an official written request in Japanese and was assured by Japanese attorneys that normally a hearing would be rescheduled when a lawyer suddenly resigned like this. Because of the lack of time, I was unable to find a qualified Japanese attorney willing to take on my case, and ended up having to represent myself in Japanese district court. Throughout this whole case I have presented exhaustive evidence (including dozens of documents, photos, tape recordings, videotapes, affidavits signed by 25 friends of my daughters, etc.), which has been brushed aside by all the judges and officials who are responsible for determining these cases. Japanese judges have made custody rulings regarding my children without once having seen them or even independently verifying that they are attending school or are even physically present in Japan.

3.) Japanese Bureaucracy: I have visited all the Japanese bureaucracies that I can think of, that might be able to lend me assistance in locating my daughters, or making some kind of progress in resolving this matter. I have gone to the city office, where my wife and daughters are fraudulently registered (with my daughters’ names falsified), and filed a report that their address is fraudulent. This was to be investigated, but it has been almost one year now since I filed the report and nothing has happened. I have met with bureaucrats of the educational system, and they have told me there is no national computer database for locating my children. They also said that even if they had knowledge of my children, they would not share it with me because of the children’s privacy rights. I have met with an official in the Japanese National Health Insurance Agency, to obtain any health records they would have about my children, and he refused to cooperate in any way, again citing the children’s privacy rights. I have met with officials at the Japanese Embassy in Washington, as well as at the Japanese Delegation to the United Nations in New York, and despite their assurances they would try to help, they have done nothing.

4.) U.S. Embassy in Tokyo and the U.S. State Department: Their attitudes and lack of cooperation have sometimes been even worse than that of the Japanese officials I have dealt with. Despite numerous phone calls and letters to Ambassador Mondale, requesting a 5 or 10 minute meeting with myself and another American father whose children had been abducted in Japan, I never received any sort of response from Ambassador Mondale whatsoever. Members of my family also wrote letters to him, and he never even had the courtesy to reply. His total indifference to this problem was reflected throughout the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo. During one of my frequent visits to the Embassy, I was brought into the office of the Consul General, Mr. Wayne Griffith. Before I had barely said a word, he began to lecture me in a very arrogant fashion that he had a staff of Embassy Marines at his disposal, ready to throw me out of the Embassy if I was disruptive in any way. He was totally ignorant about the most basic aspects of international parental kidnapping. He angrily argued with me when I read him excerpts from a NCMEC publication which cited obligations the U.S. Embassy has in these cases. I found Mr. Griffith’s assistant, Margaret Uyehara, whom he assigned to deal with me, to also be very ignorant and inexperienced with these cases. She was also very arrogant and very rude. I have a tape recording of a phone conversation I had with her where she slammed the phone in my face, after saying she was too busy to deal with me because they were having a snow storm in Tokyo. Just like Ambassador Mondale, Secretary of State Madelyn Albright also has never dignified my family or me with a response to any of the numerous letters we have written her. Her attitude is also reflected in the Office of Children’s Issues in the State Department in Washington. They do practically no follow-up whatsoever with parents, and rarely bother to return phone calls or faxes. I still have evidence of all the phone calls and faxes I have made to the Office of Children’s Issues which were ignored and never returned. When they do speak to parents, it is very condescending and designed to deflate parents’ hopes of ever seeing their children again.

5.) U.S. Police: The local police in Virginia are basically ignorant about international kidnapping laws, and were not of any help. The FBI office in Roanoke, however, has been helpful, at least in cooperating with the indictment of my wife for international parental kidnapping. However, they do not seem to have any interest in aggressively pursuing this case with Japanese Interpol. Nothing has happened even though my wife was indicted over 2 years ago.

6.) Virginia Courts: I pursued this case all the way up to the appeals court level in Virginia, and it was always thrown out. My wife and I both attended college in Virginia, we both held Virginia drivers licenses, my wife had signed a legal certificate in Virginia that she was a Virginia resident, and she listed a Virginia address with INS while we were temporarily residing in Japan, but the Virginia courts ignored all this and felt there was no significant connection to Virginia. Basically the Virginia judges did not want to get entangled in an international case, and took the easy way out by pushing it away.

7.) National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC): Even though my children are missing, and are being psychologically, if not physically, exploited, for the first 3 years NCMEC has refused to register them in their system, because I did not have a U.S. custody order. It has pretty much been a ‘‘Catch-22’’ situation for me, because I could not get U.S. courts to hear my case, and so it’s been impossible to get a custody order in the U.S. NCMEC needs to recognize that international cases are different from domestic cases, and adapt accordingly. As you can see, all the various systems that are supposed to help parents in these kinds of cases are largely ineffective. My experiences are not unique. Through an organization that I co-founded in Japan, called Children’s Rights Council-Japan, I have come across dozens of cases like mine in Japan, and in practically all these cases the left behind parents have been unsuccessful in maintaining regular personal relations and direct contacts with their children, as guaranteed by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Japan ratified in its entirety on April 22, 1994. In my own case over a dozen articles of this convention have been violated by Japan, including my children’s rights to both of their parents, both of their extended families, both of their nationalities, both their religions, as well as the right to their native language, English.

What do I recommend that the Committee on Foreign Relations do, that would effectively address this problem of international parental kidnapping? As a member of the United Nations, I think the U.S. should be adamant that countries which sign a United Nations treaty, do so with sincerity. If a country does not sign a treaty in sincerity, then it should be forced to withdraw from it. Accordingly, I respectfully ask your committee to introduce a resolution in the United States Senate calling on Japan, as well as other countries that have signed the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child treaty and are not abiding by it, to withdraw from it. Furthermore, I believe Japan’s application to become a member of the U.N. Security Council should be denied. I really think this would have an immediate impact upon Japan to clean up its act. No country wants to have an international reputation for violating children’s rights.

When I moved to Japan in November of 1992 with my wife and children, I assumed I was moving to a civilized country which respected children’s rights like they are respected in the United States. I now know that Japan, and many other countries as well, have no respect for children’s rights as defined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child treaty. These countries are sanctuaries for child abductors, and they should be forced to withdraw from the treaty. At least this would give fair warning to Americans thinking of marrying citizens of those countries, or moving to those countries with their American born children.

Thank you very much for giving me this opportunity to present my experiences and views.

Sincerely,

WALTER BENDA.