The abolition of the Hague Child Abduction Convention and the Brussels II Regulation is not an abstract legal debate for me. It is deeply personal. These instruments have shaped my life in the most devastating way imaginable: they have kept me separated from my children for over one and a half years.

 

For more than 18 months, I have been forced to live without my children — without holding them, without comforting them when they are scared or sad, without being present for their daily lives, their milestones, their laughter, and their tears. I have missed irreplaceable moments of their childhood that no court decision, no apology, and no future ruling can ever give back.

 

These conventions, as they are currently applied, reduced my children to case numbers and procedural objects, rather than recognising them as human beings with emotional needs — and me as a parent whose role is not optional, conditional, or disposable. They prioritised rigid legal frameworks over lived reality, speed over safety, and formal jurisdiction over the emotional and psychological wellbeing of children.

 

As a parent, I have been denied the most basic, universal human experience: the ability to care for my own children. I have not been there to comfort them when they were sick, to reassure them when they were frightened, to guide them through everyday life, or simply to be present in the way that any parent in the world should be allowed to be.

 

This prolonged separation has not only harmed me — it has harmed my children. Childhood does not pause while adults argue over jurisdiction. Children grow, change, and form memories in real time. Every day of enforced separation is a day that cannot be recovered.

 

I am not calling for abolition out of anger or revenge. I am calling for abolition because my experience has shown me that these systems, in their current form, can enable profound injustice, silence parents, and normalise prolonged parent–child separation under the guise of legal cooperation.

 

No international agreement should have the power to erase a parent from a child’s life for years while claiming to act in the child’s best interests. No legal framework should make this level of suffering possible — or acceptable.

 

This is why this matters to me.

This is why I am speaking out.

And this is why I believe these conventions, as they stand, must be abolished and replaced with systems that truly protect children, parents, and fundamental human rights and bonds.