Sects: French judges to protect children at risk
08/04/2010 | Mise à jour : 14:26
[DIGEST] - French judges have to weigh up the risks to children when one or other of their parents joins a religious cult. These delicate situations often involve separation and hotly contested claims involving parental rights.
Children can find themselves in danger of being abused by legally unchallengeable parental practices when the mother or father becomes an adept of a religious cult. This legal no man’s land represents a challenge to judges when parents separate and the fight begins for custody and access rights, with decisions having to be made in the interests of the child despite the letter of the law.
The child’s well-being first
The Miviludes is the official authoritative body charged with the surveillance of cultic activity in France and the fight against cultic abuse. Its yearly report, published this on April 7, includes an appraisal of legal judgments rendered by family division judges. A representative study has led Miviludes General Secretary Amélie Cladière to declare that judges “must not allow themselves to get caught up in an automatic ‘cult = restriction of parental rights’ mindset, which is what the conclusions of lawyers often incite them to do.”
But she also insists that the unique issue is that of the child’s well-being and the right to adequate physical and mental health, the right to play, to rest, and to have access to cultural development, as laid down by the International Convention on Children’s Rights which was ratified by France in 1990. Specialists maintain that the convention should form the basis of more judgments and they point out that the current state of affairs permits an overly diverse range of judgmental criteria being used to establish legal decisions.
Inconsistent judgments
This situation is what led to a 2003 Tribunal decision in Chambéry which left a child in the care of its mother after she had joined “a cult which advocated the interdiction of medical care in favour of hand-healing therapy.” However, because the mother also took her child to consultations with a pediatrician the only limit imposed on her was “the strictest interdiction to take her child to the cult’s premises or meetings.” On the other hand an almost identical situation in Rennes in 2007 resulted in the child being obliged to live elsewhere.
Another example of differing approaches can be seen in cases involving cults which refuse blood transfusions. Some judges adopted a “principle of precaution” and gave principle custody of the child to the parent who did not believe in that practice, whereas others considered that shared custody constituted a sufficient safeguard.
A lack of training and knowledge
The Miviludes noted in their report that magistrates are asking for more training to help them cope with these situations, in which risk is not omnipresent but only a theoretical possibility.
Numerous experienced lawyers in the field of cultic abuse claim that social service investigators and other specialists should also be more fully trained in the issues. One of them, Line N’kaoua, underlines that “because of their lack of knowledge in this field, they are not asking the right questions and are missing the tell-tale signs of problems. They decide in favour of the cult-member parent nine times out of ten.”
Lawyer Roselyne Duvouldy notes that in most cases it is the female partner who becomes a cult member. “But in the large majority of cases the judge privileges maternal links” she deplored. She maintains that a large majority of these decisions do not take the child’s best interests into account.
----
» The original article from Le Figaro is available here (French).
» Photo by Broma (Flickr CC)
09/04/2010
