Mr. Chairman, Members of the Committee,

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak to you today about an issue very close to my heart: International Parental Child Abduction. You may know that I started the Office of Children’s Issues, back in 1994, when I was Managing Director for Overseas Citizen Services and I am extremely proud of what they have accomplished in the ten years since its creation. I have continued to take a personal interest in Children’s Issues, which is why I have traveled to Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, the UAE, Austria, Germany, Sweden, Spain, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Australia, the Philippines, Pakistan, India, Mexico and three times to Saudi Arabia to discuss consular issues with a special focus on international child abduction since I became Assistant Secretary in November 2002. Working closely with our embassies and consulates abroad, our partners in the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), and with both state and federal law enforcement officials we have been successful in returning children from many countries back to their families in the United States. To help prevent abductions, we also maintain a Child Passport Information Alert Program to let parents know if someone applies for a U.S. passport on behalf of the their child without the parent’s consent. In 2003, we returned 188 abducted or wrongfully retained children to their American homes from 61 countries both within the Hague Abduction Convention community and from non-Hague States. Since November of 2002, 14 abducted or wrongfully retained children have been returned from Saudi Arabia

Let me try to give you a sense for the diverse and compelling nature of some of these cases. In one return from South Africa, the child had been abducted by her mother and remained abroad for 20 months. The courts ordered the child’s return pursuant to the Hague Abduction Convention. With the cooperation of DHS, we were able to reunite the child with her father. In Turkey, we succeeded in returning a child who was at serious risk. Her father had hidden the child from Turkish authorities. The court was finally able to locate the child after 13 months in an air duct at the father’s residence. Because of the work of our embassy in Ankara, the court acted swiftly to remove the child from her father, who had threatened to harm her and had made death threats against the left behind parent and her other children. In an Irish case, two children were sent to visit their father in Ireland. He returned only one of them. Through the Hague process, the wrongfully retained child was returned to his mother in the United States in less than four months from the onset of the case. In Iraq, we assisted a young woman who had been wrongfully retained by her father there for 14 years to return to her mother in the United States. She was set to return just when the war in Iraq began, and finally last month we were able to assist her to depart Iraq. In Mexico, the destination country for the largest number of children abducted from the U.S., but from which only 25 children returned in 2003, we worked with our Embassy, NCMEC and Mexican law enforcement and social welfare authorities to return a child to her mother. This story is particularly compelling, since the mother had given up hope of ever finding the child. A relative, sickened by the father’s treatment of the child, contacted NCMEC and we worked cooperatively and quickly to locate the mother and reunite her with her child within a month.

Pursuant to the provisions of the International Child Abduction Remedies Act (ICARA), the President designated the Department of State as the U.S. Central Authority for the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. The Department sets policy and provides direction for its partner, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), as it handles casework seeking the return of or access to children brought to the United States from Hague partner countries. When a child is abducted from the United States to a foreign country, the Office of Children's Issues works with NCMEC and United States embassies and consulates abroad to assist the child and left-behind parent in a number of ways.

Regardless of whether or not the Hague Abduction Convention applies to a given case, the Office of Children's Issues works closely with parents whose children have been taken from the U.S. to a foreign country to determine the welfare of the children, provide information about the foreign legal system and work with local authorities to attempt to facilitate recovery of and access to the children.

On average, each year caseworkers are engaged with 1100 families seeking the return to the United States of children abducted or wrongfully retained abroad. The countries with the largest number of cases include Mexico, Germany, the United Kingdom, Egypt, Canada, Jordan, France, Japan, India, Lebanon, Australia, Spain, and Pakistan.

In their work with left-behind parents, abduction case officers in the Office of Children's Issues provide informational tools parents can then use to determine their own best course of action according to the unique circumstances involved in their family's case. We held three Town Hall meetings for left-behind parents in order to share information and elicit parents’ views on how we can better support them. Responding to a parent’s suggestion, we publish a newsletter called “For the Parents,” to provide useful information to left-behind parents.

As the law now requires, this year’s Hague Compliance Report includes a new section on access. We use the reporting cycle to actively engage our diplomatic missions in raising compliance issues with their host governments, making the report a more useful tool in our diplomatic efforts.

Our Victims’Assistance Specialists, part of the Bureau of Consular Affairs’ Office of Overseas Citizens Services, work with the Office of Children’s Issues to identify local, state, and federal benefits available to left-behind parents and their children. As a result, we have made it possible for left-behind parents to travel overseas to recover their children through lawful means. We have ensured that parents and children receive the counseling and support they need upon the child’s return. We believe this is a crucial service that we can provide on behalf of parents and children.

On the multilateral level, the Department's Office of Children's Issues continues to work, in collaboration with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, with the Permanent Bureau of the Hague Conference on Private International Law on “Good Practices” guides that will help both new and established Central Authorities develop effective common procedures and practices when handling Hague abduction and access cases. The good practices guides will, we hope, foster greater consistency as Central Authorities handle cases and prevent some of the start-up problems we have seen with new parties to the Convention. Department officers regularly attend Hague Special Commission meetings to communicate U.S. concerns about the Convention's operation and the U.S. maintains an active role in developing standards for Hague Abduction Convention implementation.

Around the globe, we actively engage foreign governments on the issue of international parental child abduction and on individual cases. As I noted at the beginning of my remarks, during the past year alone, I have traveled to countries in the Middle East, Europe, Latin America, and South Asia on trips focused on international parental child abduction. I have also met with foreign officials in Washington from Brazil, Poland, Turkey, Syria, Austria, Germany, Sweden, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Lebanon, Morocco, and other countries on numerous occasions, often to seek help in resolving individual cases.

We have signed Memoranda of Understanding with Egypt and Lebanon that set forth shared principles of parental and consular access to children, and provide the basis for further communications. These MOUs explicitly state that access is no substitute for the return of an abducted or wrongfully retained child, but is crucial for helping a left-behind parent maintain a meaningful relationship with his or her child. We have initiated discussions and provided draft language for similar MOUs with a number of other countries in the region, including Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Pakistan, and India.

In our view, countries that accede to the Hague Convention should be prepared to meet the obligations they undertake when they become parties. As countries accede, we review the state of their administrative and judicial infrastructure to determine whether they will be able to work effectively with us under the Convention. We recently accepted the accession of Uruguay, the 54th country that we will work with in the Hague Abduction Convention framework.

We are grateful for the interest and support for children’s issues that we have received from Congress. Let me now, if I may, address some of the ways in which Congress, and specifically this committee, can continue to help us fulfill this important mission.

Since 1995, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has played a vital role in assisting us to perform our Central Authority responsibilities for children abducted to the United States from other Convention countries. We value our partnership with NCMEC and are committed to continue working closely together to prevent and combat international parental child abduction. NCMEC's expertise and national networks make NCMEC uniquely effective in helping us give force to the Hague Abduction Convention in the United States.

NCMEC helps the U.S. Government meet its obligations under the Hague Abduction Convention and the ICARA. NCMEC assists parents whose children have been abducted to the U.S. to locate and seek their children’s return abroad through the courts, as provided under ICARA. Its role parallels closely that of the Department of State, which works with foreign governments to assist parents to obtain return to the United States of U.S.-citizen children abducted or wrongfully kept abroad.

We believe it is important that other governments understand the priority the U.S. government – both the Administration and the Congress – places on resolving and preventing the tragedy of international parental child abduction. The State Department strives to persuade other countries to live up to their Hague Abduction Convention treaty obligations and return children abducted to their countries back to the child’s habitual residence in the United States, where custody issues can be resolved. NCMEC’s effectiveness in performing this treaty function for children abducted to the United States puts us in a very strong position to persuade foreign governments to do likewise and return children who have been abducted or wrongfully retained abroad. NCMEC’s expertise in locating children and its domestic network of law enforcement contacts are immensely important to the Department’s ability to apply the Hague Abduction Convention and ICARA effectively in the United States and to insist on its effective application in our partner countries.

The Department's ability to perform its statutory and treaty obligations would be seriously impaired if we could no longer count on NCMEC's assistance. The Code of Federal Regulations, the Cooperative Agreement between NCMEC and the Departments of State and Justice, as well as clear standard operating procedures articulate clearly NCMEC's vital role in Hague abduction cases. NCMEC has expressed concern that litigation risks could jeopardize its ability to perform these functions. The Administration looks forward to working with Congress to examine these issues and find appropriate solutions.

We agree with the drafters of HR4347 that it is vitally important that U.S. and foreign judges understand the law of the Hague Abduction Convention and how it operates. In some countries, judges order the return of a child consistent with the Convention but lack the mechanisms to enforce their orders. In some other countries, judges either are not aware of their responsibilities under the Convention, or simply disregard them.

We already dedicate significant resources to providing effective judicial training for U.S. and foreign judges, but believe more can be done. We regularly participate in judicial training programs held by organizations in the U.S. We applaud all efforts to expand and institutionalize such training opportunities. The Department, working in coordination with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, has also hosted groups of judges and other officials responsible for implementing the Hague Abduction Convention in their countries on visits that allow them to meet and talk to their counterparts about how the Convention is implemented in the U.S. We also contribute to training programs on the Hague Abduction Convention for U.S. and foreign judges. In October 2003, we co-sponsored an international judicial seminar with Germany that involved several European countries and Israel, held under the auspices of the Hague Permanent Bureau. This coming fall, we will co-host a judicial seminar for judges from the U.S., Mexico, and a number of Latin American countries.

We actively promote interagency cooperation on behalf of left-behind parents and their children. We could not operate effectively without close coordination by the many agencies—state and local law enforcement, and U.S. federal agencies—who are also involved in these cases. We meet regularly with other federal agencies to discuss our mutual efforts to assist left-behind parents and prevent new abductions. This dialogue has helped identify new areas for cooperation and action.

The Office of Children's Issues and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's International Division share information about abduction cases that come to their attention and provide joint training on parental child abduction to law enforcement officials both in the United States and abroad. Through participation in the Federal Task Force for Missing and Exploited Children and our active leadership role in the Senior Policy Group and Interagency Working Group meetings that focus on international parental child abduction, the Department of State promotes better communication and cooperative efforts between agencies that respond to international parental child abduction and work to prevent international abductions. A recent example of successful interagency cooperation is worth mentioning. By acting quickly to involve U.S. and foreign authorities in two countries, we successfully thwarted an abduction in progress. This effort—which began one evening and lasted over a tense weekend—involved the Department, the FBI, local airport law enforcement, consular officers and foreign government officials in two foreign countries. The effort succeeded because all involved recognized the importance of stopping an abduction.

The role of consular officers in protecting children is recognized in the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, which now has over 160 countries as parties. We take our responsibility for our children extremely seriously. And I take it personally. Our responsibilities for American citizen children are all the greater for their innate vulnerability and need for protection. We will not rest until all our children are home with their custodial parents. Thank you.