Attn: Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights
(OHCHR) OHCHR-UNOG 8-14 Avenue de la Paix 1211 Genève 10, Switzerland

25th April 2006

Re: Parental Alienation

Dear OHCHR,

Today 25th of April is International Parental Alienation Awareness Day, concerning a very serious matter, a life trauma that we could so easily protect our children and families from.

Each letter you will be receiving from us will be on the same topic. Please note that on some of the envelopes the stamps have a child's face on. Each face is the face of a victim of a kidnapping, a victim of parental alienation. Each child is the child of a parent who is writing to you.

As you probably know, American and Canadian judges in an expanding number of states take the matter very seriously and a parent who alienates a child from the other parent can face up to two years in prison. In the rest of the world, very little if anything substantial is yet being done to protect children and adults from the dangers of such mistreatment.

It is a desperately sad situation of social rejection to create for a family, in particular children who even as grown-ups can be shattered by the realization that the parent they have been taught to despise or hate was just a parent who loved them. Experts on this pathology are increasingly disturbed by its spread and depth, as it has disastrous consequences for social cohesion and the integration of all ages and both sexes in the wider community.

We, parents and victims, ask you the following: please protect our children, victims of parental alienation. In order to protect human rights, one ought to protect, first and foremost, children's rights to their family. We ask:

1. For enhanced and decisive regulatory decisions such that it is recognised that a child has the right to both parents, and that such family ties must be protected.

2. That child abduction or obstruction of contact should be recognized as human rights abuses under both national and international law, whether practised by parents against each other or by officials against an individual parent, so that an alienating parent or an alienating official can be taken to court and tried for these crimes, with the degree of alienation taken into account, thereby tilting the balance in favour of caring parents, irrespective of their sex.

3. That items 1 and 2 be integrated into the framework for dealing with both international and domestic child removal. For too long we have lived under a child abduction régime.

4. Concerning non-respect of contact rights and parental kidnappings to which a blind eye is turned by the judiciary, in order to get conventions and laws on co-parenting to be respected, we must have a "no-delay" justice system where non-compliance is felt to be a risk. It is not acceptable that a judge delays reaching judgment when such delay may result in extended periods of loss of contact. Neither the children, nor we, have the time for this any more.

We hope, dear Sir or Madam, that you will do your best to prevent parental alienation, so that we and our children can have our own cultural values respected as well as all our other human rights, as human beings, with human families, and so that we no longer have to go through this ordeal.

Yours sincerely,

Some loving fathers and mothers,

        John Baker, Families Need Fathers (chair), Brighton (UK)
        Julian Fitzgerald, Euro-dads&mums (EDM), Leeds (UK)
        Pascal Gallez, Bruxelles, (BE) 
        Sabine Vander Elst, Bruxelles (BE) 
        Lisa Cohen on behalf of Jewish Unity for Multiple Parenting (JUMP), London (UK)