01 February 2008, Friday

by: ANNE ANDLAUER İSTANBUL

When Jacques Chelouche kissed his 4-year-old daughter goodbye on April 8, 2004, nothing could have foretold that this was the beginning of a distressing battle for the right to see his child -- a battle that would involve no less than 50 trips to Turkey, half a dozen court decisions and immeasurable anxiety and frustration. 

Parental child abductions are complex and confusing enough when they occur within one country's borders. International instances only increase legal obstacles, waiting periods and emotional trauma for all parties involved. On paper, the case of little Caroline Chelouche is anything but exceptional. Removal or retention of a child across an international border by one parent -- the usual definition for international parental child abduction -- is by far the most common kind of child abduction. Yet every case is unique and each deserves its facts to be carefully recalled.

Three years of judiciary battles

In April 1997, Turkish citizen Teri Ethel Eskinazi married Jacques Chelouche, a French-Israeli national, in a ceremony conducted by the French consular authorities in Tel Aviv. Their daughter, Caroline, was born on Jan. 27, 2000 and raised in Tel Aviv, where she attended kindergarten. Caroline was granted French, Turkish and Israeli citizenship, while her mother's marriage to a French citizen entitled her to a French passport in March 2004.

A few weeks later, on April 8, 2004, Caroline and her mother traveled to Turkey to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Pesach with her maternal grandparents. Since then, Caroline has not returned to Israel. On May 17, 2004, Israel's Rabbinical Court ordered Eskinazi to bring her daughter back to Israel within seven days. Failure to do so would be treated as "wrongful removal" of the child within the framework of the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, an international treaty incorporated into Israeli law in 1991. The Rabbinical Court also permitted Jacques Chelouche to "use all the avenues open to him" to uphold his rights and issued an order barring his wife and daughter from leaving Israel. That judgment was the first of a long list of court decisions, all of them ruling in favor of the child's father.

In June 2004, the Israeli Justice Ministry applied to Turkish authorities in a move to secure Caroline's return to her country of birth. The Turkish Justice Ministry referred the case to the Sarıyer Public Prosecutor's Office in İstanbul. On the basis of the information provided by the Israeli authorities that Caroline had spent most of her life in Israel and that her country of habitual residence, for the purposes of the Hague Convention, was Israel, the Sarıyer Family Court decided on Oct. 25, 2004 that the child should be returned to Israel. The judgment was upheld twice by the Supreme Court of Appeals, first on March 29, 2005 and then on Sept. 22, 2005.

In October 2005, Jacques Chelouche began proceedings seeking judicial enforcement of the decision ordering his daughter to be returned. In parallel, Caroline's mother applied in April 2005 to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg against the Turkish Republic, claiming that she did not receive a fair trial in Turkey (within the framework of Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights). As the European court's decision reads, Eskinazi further argued that sending her daughter to Israel "would amount to a violation of Article 8 (right to respect for private and family life) of the Convention" and stated that "it would be against the best interests of the child to be separated from her mother and sent to a country where she had no points of reference and did not speak the language."

'Somewhere in İstanbul'

On Dec. 13, 2005, the European court rejected Eskinazi's appeal, describing it as "manifestly ill-founded." The court held that the Turkish authorities could not be regarded as having been in breach of their obligations under Article 6 of the Convention, or of the right to respect for family life guaranteed by Article 8. At the time when the Israeli central authorities lodged the request for Caroline's return, the court noted, she was regarded as having been wrongfully removed for the purposes of the Hague Convention, a treaty enforced in both Israel and Turkey. Eskinazi's lawyer declined comment on the court decisions as well as on other questions related to the case, emphasizing that the case was still pending.

During the five months that followed Caroline's departure for Turkey, Jacques Chelouche says he was unable to see or talk to his daughter. Upon his request, Chelouche was eventually granted limited visitation rights and started to visit Caroline at the Eskinazi family home in İstanbul. "My wife would not let me see our daughter until the first hearing at the Sarıyer Family Court," Chelouche explains in an interview with Today's Zaman. "After five months, I was finally able to visit Caroline twice a month, on weekends. Those arrangements lasted until December 2005, with my wife's family making all possible efforts to disturb those visits. But at least I was seeing my child
 

Original Article:

http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/detaylar.do?load=detay&link=132940