Quote: (01-28-2011 09:00 AM)kimleebj Wrote:
Japan is not a signatory to the Hague Convention on Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction... .
There are 82 outstanding child abduction cases in Japan... .
But the State Department has said it is not aware of any case where the Japanese courts have returned a child abducted to Japan to the United States.[/i]
It is the same in a lot of countries. Russia, Thailand, most of Eastern Europe. Generally when a baby is born in US, and one or both his parents have foreign citizenship, he gets US citizenship because he was born in US, and one or two foreign citizenship since he inherits the citizenship of his parents by the laws of his parent country. It results in funny cases - for example, my kids are citizens of three countries right now.
What it means, that if one parent grabs the child and flies back to the country the child is citizen of, for that particular country legally it looks like a baby was brought home, and typically there are no legal means to force the country to "deport" its citizen. Especially if the sole reason for that is that an US court said so. Now if someone manages to bring the child back to US out of that country, it will be classified as "child abduction" by local authorities as well. There were several well-published cases in Russia in 2010.