http://www.japantoday.com/category/politics/view/japan-moves-closer-to-joining-child-custody-pact
Japanese accession to the Hague Convention under this “legislation” should be rejected by all signatories and all decent people, everywhere. The legislation is a display of absolute defiance of the convention, and of the principle of international law. The purpose of the convention itself is to stop countries like Japan from continually abducting massive numbers of children, by obligating the state to which the children were abducted to return the kids to the jurisdiction from which they were abducted and prevent corrupt local courts (such as Japanese family courts) from claiming a say (“jurisdiction”) in the matter. This is an ugly farce, aimed at securing Japan’s right to pretend that decades of rampant child abduction haven’t happened. Just say no!
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20120309p2g00m0dm033000c.html
“The bill states that Japanese family courts will decide whether to return children retained by one parent in Japan when requests are made by the other parent.
The courts may reject requests if more than one year has passed since children were taken (ABDUCTED) to Japan, children refuse to go back (!!), there is a risk of exposing children to physical or psychological harm or parents requesting children’s return have a history of child neglect.”
A Japanese court system with DECADES of history of child abuse and abduction masked as custody determination hereby RETAINS its supposed right to continue to make these determinations without any revision of its requirements for evidence, adherence t0 truth or acknowledgment of its historical reality while signing an international abduction treaty. Sheer nonsense!!!!
I cannot help wondering about the coincidental approval of this bill on the weekend of the anniversary of Japan’s tsunami and Self-Nuking (Carnegie Endowment Report) in 2011. There seems to be plenty of ideological coverage.
Stop this unfolding nightmare from happening to our children!
For Rui Boy 
Great idea. They should simultaneously drop other treaty partners with long established non-compliance. The USA is a treaty partner with many countries who benefit from the Convention but are totally non-compliant with their reciprocal obligations. Unfortunately the Department of State will not do this since their primary goals with regard to the problem are resolved by the Convention regardless of whether or not children are being returned or Compliance exists. Namely, they are able to make potiential diplomatic irritants become obfuscated, if not entirely lost, in the fog, vagaries and complexities of international law, jurisdiction and respect for the sovereignty of foreign courts.
LikeLike
Indeed, the State Department wants only for the visibility of the countless cases of international abduction to be re-submerged. For Japan and undoubtedly others, signing the Convention serves this purpose at little or no cost to the country. Complicating all this, the U.S. is non-compliant on ITS international human rights obligations, treaties and otherwise, which provides cover for the Japanese and others. Human rights conventions and treaties require a domestic focus on the obligations of the countries adopting them where they have jurisdiction; but of course it would be short-sighted in the global economy and the rate at which people and goods and capital move around the world to limit the view of these obligations only within territorial borders. Human rights in the United States, for example, includes children exploited in manufacturing products for the U.S. market, Americans traveling abroad to exploit minors, AND the outbound international abduction of children from the U.S. who receive NO substantial support from the Department of State or Justice to bring them back home.
LikeLike