Re: My thoughts
on sending you copies of the court decisions as requested by you.
Dear Mr Duin,
Having given some considerable thought to your request yesterday for me
to send you all the decisions of the courts in the case of international child
abduction to Germany of the children, J-M and S Hickman in January 1996,
I have come up with the following proposal, which I believe will bring us
much closer to a true understanding of the issue.
Many of the important issues and background knowledge are covered in the
CD that I gave you at our meeting on the 25.02.04, which will give you a
good initial understanding of the problem and the considerable amount of
information I have collected on the subject. However most of my original
records are in South Africa. Furthermore and more importantly when
I had the opportunity to have access to my file I found many documents as
well as private notes made by the judges concerned in the file that the court
had not presented or made known to me. For instance the note made by Richterin
Blohm in 1999 where she notes that she had advised my attorney to retract
my application even although I had come to Germany from South Africa for
the case. This was then carried out without my permission or knowledge, this
is only one incident amongst many. Such as the following court hearing I
came to Germany for in July 2000, only when I arrived in the court room and
asked where the German abducting parent was I discovered that she had been
given permission by the judge Blohm not to be present, it is not recorded
in the court file that she was officially given leave of absence. The attorney
Dr Uwe Biester was however present in court. I wasted
two weeks in Germany then returned to South Africa, a decision could not
be made at the court hearing as the German abducting parent and the bi-national
victim children were not there, I did not see my children. This was done
deliberately with the full assistance and knowledge of the member of the
judicial controlling body, the politician Dr. Uwe Biester CDU who sat across
the court room from me on that occasion. These private notes and other
information that were never made public or mentioned in the court hearings
play an important role in how come the rights of the children have been violated
as they have been by the court and the German officials concerned. I believe
the only way that we are ever going to get an accurate assessment of what
has transpired to date would be to have the court files sent to you by the
district court of Wilhelmshaven and for me then to be present to guide you
through them with question and comment where needs be. Having the files sent
to you should be no problem at all, you being a German registered attorney
once I have given you a written power of attorney to order access to them.
If we are interested to and want to get to the truth this is the only way
that I believe we are going to get there.
I request that if this proposal is acceptable to you, that we should invite
Prof. Dr. Pöttering, who is professor of law and who has been
asked to look into the matter by Mrs Banotti. I propose to attend a joint
meeting in Emden or preferably for me in Wilhelmshaven, so that we can jointly
scrutinise the files in great detail to access exactly what has been going
on in the district court of Wilhelmshaven and since the very first day that
the children were illegally taken to Wilhelmshaven, Germany. In addition
I believe that we should invite Dr. Uwe Biester to attend the meeting, as
he is the responsible politician for my area Wilhelmshaven. Dr. Uwe Biester
MdL for the Christian Democratic Union should be invited in his official
capacity as a member of the judicial controlling body (Justizprüfungsamt)
of the state government of Lower Saxony, to observe for himself, to take
our questions and to explain to us exactly what has happen in a case that
he is directly involved in his private capacity as an attorney and in his
official capacity as the responsible politician. He must be asked what
he intends to do in regards to recommending disciplinary measures against
the judges concerned and ensuring that such abuse of the German legal system
never occurs again in particular in a case of international child abduction
to Wilhelmshaven or elsewhere in Lower Saxony.
Not leaving out what he intends proposing to do to rectify the issue of
the boycott of access to the two abducted violated bi-children in the shortest
possible period of time.
I await your response before taking any further action in regards to sending
you the court decisions that I do have here in Germany with me.
Yours faithfully
Michael Hickman
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