Parental Alienation
Attn:
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights
(OHCHR) OHCHR-UNOG 8-14 Avenue de la Paix 1211 Genève 10, Switzerland
25th April 2006
Re: Parental Alienation
Dear OHCHR,
Today 25th of April is International Parental Alienation Awareness Day, concerning a very serious matter, a life trauma that we could so easily protect our children and families from.
(En inglés y francés)
Publicado el
Each letter you will be receiving from us will be on the same topic. Please note that on some of the envelopes the stamps have a child's face on. Each face is the face of a victim of a kidnapping, a victim of parental alienation. Each child is the child of a parent who is writing to you.
As you probably know, American and Canadian judges in an expanding number of states take the matter very seriously and a parent who alienates a child from the other parent can face up to to two years in prison. In the rest of the world, nothing substantial is yet being done to protect children and adults from such mistreatment, indeed often the reverse.
It is a desperately sad situation of social rejection to create for a family, in particular children who even as grown-ups can be shattered by the realisation that the parent they have been taught to despise or hate was just a parent who loved them.
Experts on this pathology are increasingly disturbed by its spread and depth, as it has disastrous consequences for social cohesion and the integration of all ages and both sexes in the wider community.
We, parents and victims, ask you the following: please protect our children, victims of parental alienation. In order to protect human rights, one ought to protect, first and foremost, children's rights to their family.
We ask:
1. For enhanced and decisive regulatory decisions such that it is recognised that a child has the right to both parents, and that such family ties must be protected.
2. That parental alienation should be recognized as an abuse and national laws should take that fact into consideration, so that an alienating parent or an alienating official can be taken to court and tried for this crime, thereby tilting the balance in favour of caring parents, irrespective of their sex.
3. To get points 1 and 2 not just into the framework for international but also nationally based child kidnapping. For too long we have lived under a child abduction régime.
4. Concerning non-respect of contact rights and parental kidnappings to which a blind eye is turned by the judiciary:
i) in order to get conventions and laws on co-parenting to be respected, we must have a "calendar" justice system where non-compliance is felt to be a risk. It is not acceptable that a judge delays a judgment before reaching a decision. Neither the children, nor we, have the time for this, any more.
We hope, dear Sir or Madam, that you will do your best to prevent parental alienation, so that we and our children can have our own cultural values respected as well as all our other human rights, as human beings, with human families, and so that we no longer have to go through this ordeal.
Yours sincerely,
Some loving fathers and mothers
[Signature*, (Organisation/town), 2-letter national symbol in brackets*],
As you probably know, American and Canadian judges in an expanding number of states take the matter very seriously and a parent who alienates a child from the other parent can face up to to two years in prison. In the rest of the world, nothing substantial is yet being done to protect children and adults from such mistreatment, indeed often the reverse.
It is a desperately sad situation of social rejection to create for a family, in particular children who even as grown-ups can be shattered by the realisation that the parent they have been taught to despise or hate was just a parent who loved them.
Experts on this pathology are increasingly disturbed by its spread and depth, as it has disastrous consequences for social cohesion and the integration of all ages and both sexes in the wider community.
We, parents and victims, ask you the following: please protect our children, victims of parental alienation. In order to protect human rights, one ought to protect, first and foremost, children's rights to their family.
We ask:
1. For enhanced and decisive regulatory decisions such that it is recognised that a child has the right to both parents, and that such family ties must be protected.
2. That parental alienation should be recognized as an abuse and national laws should take that fact into consideration, so that an alienating parent or an alienating official can be taken to court and tried for this crime, thereby tilting the balance in favour of caring parents, irrespective of their sex.
3. To get points 1 and 2 not just into the framework for international but also nationally based child kidnapping. For too long we have lived under a child abduction régime.
4. Concerning non-respect of contact rights and parental kidnappings to which a blind eye is turned by the judiciary:
i) in order to get conventions and laws on co-parenting to be respected, we must have a "calendar" justice system where non-compliance is felt to be a risk. It is not acceptable that a judge delays a judgment before reaching a decision. Neither the children, nor we, have the time for this, any more.
We hope, dear Sir or Madam, that you will do your best to prevent parental alienation, so that we and our children can have our own cultural values respected as well as all our other human rights, as human beings, with human families, and so that we no longer have to go through this ordeal.
Yours sincerely,
Some loving fathers and mothers
[Signature*, (Organisation/town), 2-letter national symbol in brackets*],