Our view on international abductions: U.S.-Brazil custody battle highlights wider problem
Rights of fit, biological parents take precedence over politics
This Father's Day, David Goldman will again be without his 9-year-old son, Sean. Five years ago, Sean's mother took him on a two-week vacation to her native Brazil. They never returned. Goldman's wife informed the New Jersey man that she was divorcing him. She later remarried.
A treaty, the 1983 Hague Convention on International Child Abduction, is supposed to address cases like these. But in Sean's case — and in a growing number of others, including 50 American children in Brazil — it has failed.