14 Oct 2022. By Ella Hopkins, for EachOther UK
When Kim Fawcett left her abusive partner, she fled their home in Spain with their six-week-old daughter to a local refuge with little more than a few baby clothes. She was summoned to the Spanish courts by her ex-partner over child custody arrangements, but was given permission by a judge to take her daughter and leave the country.
Fawcett went home to her mum’s house in England with her baby daughter where she felt safer. Little did she know that she had just breached an international child abduction law and was at risk of losing custody of her daughter.
The law, called the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, requires the rapid return of children who are considered to have been “wrongfully taken” from their country of habitual residence. This could be where the child has lived the longest or, in Fawcett and her daughter’s case, where the child was born.