IS THIS WHAT WE MEAN BY EUROPEAN UNION?

A British mother's London-educated children are abducted by their German father The German courts approve on the grounds that the

IT OUGHT to have been the perfect embodiment of the new Europe. Catherine

Walker, a woman born in France but raised tn England, married Peter Wagner, a Ger- man working in London. Their two young sons spoke French, German and English With equal ease. They attended a top inter- national school in Kensington and spent their holidays in a quiet town near Han- nover. They held British passports, but would be equally at home in Paris or Berlin. If any children could be said to have escaped the narrow bonds of nationalism and become truly Euro- pean, it was Philip and William Walker-Wagner. Their home was neither Germany nor France nor England but all three. They are probably among the first Britons who are genuine citizens of the European Community.

But the test of any new allegiance is its resilience during conflict. Catherine and Peter quarrelled. An attractive and vivacious wo, marl, Catherine made friends easily while her quiet, more reserved husband did not. Her success in the City — she works in the internation- al capital markets — also seemed to upset him. Like many men, he may have disliked having a wife who earned considerably more than he did. After the birth of William, their first son, he proposed they move to Ger- many for a trial period of two years. Two Years became six. His wife, now desperate to escape a suffocating existence in a small German town and feeling dominated by her In-laws, decided to move back to London. The couple reached an agreement, written and verified by a German notary': they would stay married, but live separately and share custody of their children. The boys would continue their education in London, but would spend holidays with their father in

Germany. Catherine would stay in London, where she felt she belonged, and Peter would remain in his beloved Germany. But the pan-European, cosmopolitan upbringing of their children would continue.

For two and half years, that arrangement worked well. Then last August, when Peter was due to return the children to London for the autumn term, Catherine received a letter informing her that they would not be coming back. They were going to stay with him in Germany, and there was nothing she could do about it. When attempting to resolve the issue by telephone elicited explosions of anger from her husband, Catherine reached for her lawyers. The children were made wards of court. The High Court then issued a ruling that the children had been illegally restrained by their father from returning to their mother: under Appendix 24 of the Hague Conven- tion, which governs 'the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction', the court ordered that the children be returned.

Germany, like Britain, is a signatory to the Hague Convention. But, as with many international agreements, smiles and signa- tures are one thing, actions are quite another. The gap between intention and execution is one which every country other than Britain seems expert at exploiting. Still, the issue seemed so clear-cut in this case that there was no room for manoeuvre on either side. The Hague Convention on child abduction, as Article 1(a) states, exists 'to secure the prompt return of chil- dren wrongfully removed or restrained in any contracting state'. There could be no doubt that Peter Wagn- er had 'wrongfully restrained' his children from returning to his wife and their mother. And, indeed, a German court convened in the small town of Verden, where Peter lives, accepted that fact. Judge Moritz ruled that Peter's 'retention of the children is unlawful', and ordered their immediate return to England. He dismissed Peter's 'expert' psycho- logical evidence — which claimed that the children would be harmed if they were returned to their moth- er — on the grounds that it was not indepen- dent, having been obtained 'for the sole purpose of support- ing the view of the father'.

Catherine was delighted, and very relieved. It seemed the whole ghastly episode was over. She underestimated her husband's deviousness. Peter asked for half an hour to say goodbye to his sons. Cather- ine felt she could not refuse him that. He was the boys' father, and still her husband, and she had no desire to poison relations.

He had his half hour. But he did not use it to say goodbye. He used it to bundle the boys — aged nine and seven — into a car and spirit them away.

Catherine now had two court orders for the return of her children, one from an English court, and one from its German equivalent. Both referred to the same international law. The German court order stressed that the 'court bailiff is empow- ered to enlist police support where neces- sary. The order . . . may be enforced by the application of physical force.' Cather- ine therefore thought it would be a simple matter to ensure the return of her children. But Verden is a small town. Its inhabitants are proud, determined — and fiercely loyal to Germany. Practically all of them also know Peter Wagner and his 'foreign' wife. If Chancellor Kohl has a vision of a new Europe beyond national borders, it has yet to catch fire in Verden. Presented with the prospect of having to hand over children to an alien, the town simply clammed up. Peter's lawyer shut up shop at 2.30 in the afternoon and then disappeared, making it impossible for the court order to be served on him, as the law required. The court bailiff also vanished. Strangely, not one person in Verden had the slightest idea where Peter had gone. No one had seen his car speeding away from the courthouse. To her frustration, Catherine realised there was nothing she could do — except wait.

Next day, when the bailiff had finally been located and the police had woken up, a desultory search began. But the delay had been disastrous. At 3 p.m. the same after- noon, Catherine was told that the ruling ordering the return of her children had been suspended — Peter had appealed to the higher court of Celle, a nearby town. The Celle court ruled that until they heard the case he should keep the children, because Catherine might try to hide the children in England if she was given them back.

Catherine was distraught. Her husband had flagrantly violated the law. She had abided by it, trusted him and had that trust abused. She was the wronged party. Yet the court was penalising her and rewarding him. It was absurdly, heart-breakingly unfair. But her British lawyers remained calm. They stressed that the measure was only temporary. Her husband could not possibly win on appeal. He hadn't a legal leg to stand on. The Hague Convention was explicit on the matter: the children should be returned to Catherine. The lower court had reaffirmed that just as strongly as the English court had established it. The Celle appeal court was bound to follow. There was no cause for alarm.

The Celle court duly convened for its deci- sion one month later, on 20 October 1994. Catherine arrived in Celle having not seen her children for four and a half months. She brought with her a mound of papers and sev- eral expert witnesses. None of them was called. Neither was she. The judges were to give their decision without interviewing her. Again, her lawyers counselled calm. The issue was so clear-cut, she could not lose.

But she did. The three judges announced that they were upholding Peter's appeal. The two earlier court decisions were wrong. William and Phillip should stay in Germany with their father.

Catherine burst into tears. Peter and his team — including the social worker and psychiatrist, from whom the court seemed happy to take 'independent' evidence — erupted into whoops of joy, punching the air in the manner of Boris Becker winning an important point at tennis.

The polite way of describing the appeal court's decision is 'unusual'. The accurate way is to call it bigoted and biased. The three Celle judges claimed, like the two previous courts, to base their decision on the Hague Convention. The Hague Con- vention allows that children need not be returned if the childfen themselves oppose it, and are of an age and maturity to make the decision themselves. There is nowhere in the world where a child aged seven or nine is thought mature enough to deter- mine what sort of education he should have, or even whether he should have any at all — a fact which the court frankly admitted. Why, then, did the court think William and Phillip mature enough to decide whether or not to see their mother again?

The answer is extraordinary. To quote the judgment, 'a seven-year-old child faced with the decision to join either the judo or football club will generally know which decision to make'. The judges thought the children's decision whether to spend time with their mother was on a level with whether to play football.

But there was a further reason why the children should stay in Germany. They were, the German judges determined, hot English, not French, not European; theY were German. William, the nine-year-old, 'is undergoing considerable suffering • in what he regards as an alien environmell.t. William obviously thinks in German and is obliged to "translate" in order to communi- cate . . . His entire social environment 15 based on a foreign language, since German is not spoken either at school or at home.' The judges had asked him whether the English were `different'. Although he was unable to explain exactly how, 'William felt they somehow have a different character. His meaning became clear from his description of individual circumstances which obviously depress him.' It was the same with Philip, his seven-year-old broth' er. For him, 'his brother is the most impor- tant support . . as the only person with whom he could speak German'.

Take a moment to reflect what is hall' pening here. A German court overrules two previous court decisions requiring, under international law, the return of rw° children to their mother and to England' And why? Because the boys concerned are German and that overrides everything else,. They cannot speak German in England aid the English are 'different'.

The clouds of Euro-rhetoric that have emerged from Bonn, Berlin and Strasbourg are here condensed into a drop of pure chauvinism. `Europe' is obviously as mean' ingless a concept to the German judiciarY as it is to the most extreme Tory Euro- sceptic. The boys' father is German. To the judges, it therefore follows that they are. The fact that their mother is English counts for nothing, as does the fact that mother and children are resident in England. The English are 'different'. An inability t°, speak German amounts to the infliction or severe psychological harm on good Ger," man boys. The fact that the children spew' French and English with equal ease is irrel- evant as is the fact that their mother ls English. Deutschland, Deutschland, abet alles. It is not quite the future for EuroPe that the enthusiasts had in mind, except perhaps in Germany. The crushing crassness of that sentimeht is equalled only by the crushing crassness of the German court's judgment. The judges claim merely to have relied on the children's decision. They interviewed the boys for 20 minutes. They made no effort to investigate what pressures had beerl brought to bear on the children by rheilf father, who had deliberately and iflegt: broken his agreement to share custody WI' his wife. If the judges had taken the trouble to look even briefly below the surface, It would have been obvious to them that the, children had been subject to a prolonge.° attempt to influence their attitude to theiir mother. William greeted her with kicks an the shout 'I'm German'. In a telephone, conversation, which his mother recorde°,, and which I have heard, he sounds blarri` and robotic as he repeats his wish t° remain in Germany. He told his beloved godfather — a man whom, when William was in London, he delighted to play with — that 'he could keep his presents and go away'. At the Celle hearing, Catherine had to endure the heart-rending experience of seeing her youngest son, surrounded by his father and his friends, looking desperately at her.

The judges ignored it all. They took no independent evidence whatever. They voiced all the familiar male prejudices against working mothers as a consequence: Catherine, they alleged, never played with her children; she always left them with a nanny; in the evenings, she 'went to the ,casmo,; when she went shopping, she bought expensive clothes for herself, while buying her children only cheap dross. All those statements are provably false but Catherine was never given the chance to refute them, and never will be. There is no appeal against the Celle court's deci- sion. The only avenue of redress is the Ger- man Constitutional Court, which has around 15,000 applications a year, and Which dismisses 90 per cent of them. If they follow their country's oft-proclaimed post- war line on the vices of chauvinism and the virtues of European co-operation, the eight judges who comprise Germany's highest court will no doubt be appalled at their Celle brethren's crude nationalism. Yet the appeal may be struck out before it receives a full hearing. It is not difficult to imagine the uproar if an English court were to make a decision in the way the German court has done: `If this child is sent back to his mother in Ger- many, he will have to speak German. The Germans are different, therefore he should remain with his English father.' Merely to state the argument that way is to know that no English court would follow it. As usual, the --nglish courts — practically alone in '''nroPe — are scrupulous in their adher- ence to both the letter and the spirit of the Hague Convention. 'Britain is a net exporter of children as a consequence,' explains Ann Marie Hutchinson, chairman Of Re-unite, an organisation aimed at restoring abducted children to their par- ents. 'If a court where the child is resident has ruled that the children should be returned, then English courts will uphold that ruling and the children will be on the next plane home.' Catherine Walker is aware of that fact, and, is incensed by it. 'The Lord Chancel- lor's Office seems content simply to let the Whole matter drop,' she told me. 'I am English, but English institutions seem unwilling to make any effort to help me.' e Lord Chancellor's Office, while admit- ting that the German court's decision was unfortunate for Catherine Walker', stress- es there is nothing it can do: the German en,urt has jurisdiction to interpret the Hague Convention on German soil, no matter how idiosyncratic that interpreta- tion may be. The representative of the Lord Chancellor's Office was anyway 'satis- fied that the judgment was made properly', even though 'the only people who were successful in making representations to the court were friends or relatives of the chil- dren's German father'. Defending the integrity of the Celle court, she added that 'to my knowledge, there is no problem with Germany and the Hague Convention ... the nationalistic sentiments you have detected in the judgment may be due to the translation'. With friends like that, Catherine Walker feels, she doesn't need any enemies. Since the Celle judgment, she has changed her lawyers in Germany. Her new advocate, Dr Cromer, notes that her previous firm 'acted like English lawyers. They charged her five times what I would have done.' Dr Cromer is sharp and effective, and has experience in the child abduction field — but even he is surprised by the Celle court's attitude. The German courts are now putting obsta- cles in the way of Catherine even seeing her children. She has applied for contact since the 20 October judgment, but she still has not been able to see them. Now the judge from Verden who originally ruled in her favour has said that he sees no urgency, and that he will not rule on the issue until he has taken evidence from the social worker — the same social worker who whooped for joy when the Celle judges ruled against Catherine.

It therefore now seems that the German courts are conniving in Peter Wagner's wish to deprive Catherine of contact with her two sons. It is not clear what effect the absence of their mother is having on the two boys, but it is clear that the effect can- not be good. They love her and she loves them, but they are not allowed to be together. Yet it is acknowledged by all par- ties that she has kept scrupulously to her side of the agreement, and that the previ- ous shared custody arrangement was per- fectly fair. All Catherine is asking is for that arrangement to be re-established.

What future is there for the new Europe that our government, like every other, is encouraging us to believe in and to vote for, if German courts continue to rule that it is detrimental to two British children to spend two thirds of the year in England with their English mother? Catherine Walker is being very brave and very British. But the strain of separation is starting to tell on this energetic woman. She returns home every evening to a silent flat. The emptiness created by the absence of her sons is palpable. As the German court decides whether she will ever get them back, she guards their photographs like holy relics. They are all she has left.

The names of the children and parents have been changed to protect their identity and to comply with the Child Abduction and Cus- tody Act.