Banotti (PPE-DE). - Mr President, Commisioner, you have listed a lot of
very worthy projects. As rapporteur I hope very much that I will
receive the tidied-up proposal which is due in April. It has been
mentioned in the question as well. The problem is that there are quite
a number of serious practical problems that we have to deal with. For
example, Mrs Gebhardt and Mrs Berès sit on a particular committee in
France dealing with these issues. I understand that there are, at this
very moment, about 50 outstanding cases. The biggest problem - from the
case-load I have - seems to be where parents are denied visiting rights
by the custodial parent.

I should like to list, for the record of the House, the active cases I
am working on at the moment. Mr Eric Comet, whose children are in
Finland, was granted custody by the courts in Finland. This custody he
could never exercise. His children no longer wish to see him. In Sweden
we have two cases of fathers seeking visiting rights to their children:
Philippe Paquay and Kevin Willoughby. In Germany, believed by most
people who work in this area to be the country where most of these
difficulties exist, we have Mr Guy Foster and Mr Chris McMullen; and
probably one of the best-known cases of all, Lady Catherine Meyer, the
wife of the British Ambassador in Washington, who has seen her two sons
for precisely 24 hours in the past six years.

In the Netherlands we have Mr Morales-Gouvenne and in Austria we have
Noël Dumont. The problem is that particularly in Germany, social
workers seem to be able, under German law, to make decisions about
access and custody which, in some cases, take no note of decisions made
in courts in other countries. In very many cases, the judges involved
have perhaps only one case of this sort throughhout their working life
and are therefore unfamiliar with what the Hague Convention and
hopefully now this new regulation will entail.

We still see - and unfortunately this is at the heart of most of these
cases - parents using their unfortunate children as weapons in the war
between the sexes.

Commissioner, you mentioned the Hague Convention of 1996 which,
thankfully, was recognised last November. However, it has not been
signed by any Member State, nor by the Community. This is causing
serious problems because at the heart of that legislation is the
recognition of the right of every child to know and have access to both
its parents.