FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED MAY 8, 2000
CONTACT:
Christopher Yavelow
+31-650-853-863
Christopher@yavelow.com
http://www.StolenChildren.net
WEBSITE FOCUSES ON AMERICA'S STOLEN CHILDREN
Maryland -- May 8, 2000 -- StolenChildren.net, launched this week by the Stolen Children Network, provides resources for the left-behind parents of American children who have been abducted by non-American spouses with governmental complicity, essentially stolen by a foreign country.
The website is dedicated to Celina and Stephanie Yavelow, both native-born American citizens, who had spent more than half their lives in the US before their abduction to the Netherlands.
Ironically, while a 6-year-old Cuban boy was calling the shots for the US government, Celina (14) and Stephanie (11) Yavelow were pleading with an FBI SWAT team, "We are American citizens! We want to stay in America!"
No one listened to the Yavelow children. On October 21, 1999, FBI officers brutally imprisoned their father, Christopher Yavelow, an award-winning composer and author. Then, in defiance of a court order, they looked the other way as the mother, Monique Fasel, a Swiss citizen with no proof of any rights to the US children, kidnapped Celina and Stephanie and fled to the Netherlands.
Legal loopholes in the 1988 Hague Convention treaty require the US to hand over American children to foreigners without verification of parental rights. This has created a booming child abduction industry perpetrated by European mothers and Arabian fathers.
Referring to this loophole, John Rabun, chief officer of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) stated to Yavelow on April 28, "I haven't heard of another case as bad as yours but this is certainly [due to] a huge loophole." The State Department reports that 13,000 American children have fallen through such loopholes since 1977.
Left-behind parent and grieving father Christopher Yavelow created the Stolen Children Network to help plug this loophole.
This is the second time Fasel abducted the children. In early January 1999, after a year of futile warnings to Fasel about her escalating child abuse, Yavelow disclosed he was going to the authorities. Before he could do so, she abducted them to the home of her Wicca (witchcraft) high priestess for two months. She was caught having the children's Dutch paperwork altered to state they were not American citizens.
Yavelow has been their primary care-giver for most of their lives. He and his children fought the Dutch courts for reasonable access schedules for most of 1999. This is relatively new for the Netherlands, where it wasn't until 1990 that fathers were granted any parental visitation rights at all, and shockingly, is was not until 1998 that the joint custody policy was incoporated into the laws!
Through video testimony and letters, his children unceasingly asserted their wishes to return home to their father. In contravention to Dutch law, the courts ignored their testimony.
When Yavelow provided psychologists' reports confirming the accusations of incest, rather than upholding the Netherland's new 50-50 access laws the judge proclaimed, "We have to cut the knot between the children and one of the parents, and I have decided to cut the knot between them and their father!" (It is a little-known fact that the Netherlands legal system is such that many of the judges are also practicing lawyers and some are even members of parliament. It is even possible to be a parliament member, lawyer, and judge simultaneously.)
Simultaneously, the Netherlands, where the family had been living, was being branded with the world's most deplorable record of child abuse by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child following a 5 year investigation.
There were no legal reasons to stay in the Netherlands because there had been no custody hearing. The children expressed dreams of attending American schools and churches, having American friends, and speaking English, their native language.
The family returned to New England on September 1, 1999, and drove toward the Pacific Northwest where they'd pre-arranged housing, schooling, and a custody hearing. The children repeatedly declared that being home in America was "a dream come true!"
Before they arrived at their destination, Fasel appeared in Maryland with a Hague Convention request demanding the children's return, unless "one of the few exceptions is to be applied." Yavelow and his children were well-prepared to exercise the exceptions (articles 13 and 20), but weren't permitted to do so.
Bill Flemming of the State Department's Office of International Children's Issues later disclosed to Yavelow that the Dutch authorities believed the children were Dutch citizens.
Using a fraudulent English translation, Fasel duped Maryland's Baltimore County Circuit Judge John O. Hennegan into believing that a temporary access schedule, with no legal force even in the Netherlands, was a custody order. Without informing the father or children and disregarding that Maryland had no jurisdiction over case, Hennegan "domesticated" the bogus document into a Custody Order for the mother.
Fasel built a devastating house of cards upon the spurious custody order: She obtained parental child abduction warrants and, using the warrants to bolster her credibility, listed him with INTERPOL, the NCIC, and the NCMEC. She persuaded newspapers to devote extensive inflammatory coverage to her fabrications and appeared on television with 6-year-old videos falsely portraying the teenagers as preschoolers. Finally, she influenced the FBI to place Yavelow on their "Ten Most Wanted" list.
Unaware of Fasel's deception, the Yavelow's met with realtors to find a house. They joined a church and registered for school. Celina declared, "This is what I've always dreamed of, to go to an American high school... with lockers and everything." The dream was short-lived. The next morning they noticed an article placed in the Mobile Register by Fasel.
After three weeks of searching for a Maryland lawyer by telephone came the FBI confrontation. In a heart-wrenching standoff, the children attempted to shield their father pleading, "Please don't take our father away. He has not kidnapped us. We are here of our own free will! We want to be in America. We are American citizens!"
The FBI handed the children over to Fasel who pretended to return to Maryland for the hearing, but instead abducted them to the Netherlands, herself violating the same Maryland court order she had used to obtain the arrest warrants for Yavelow.
Meanwhile, Yavelow sat in jail for 6 days without being charged. Upon his release on bail, rather than being extradited he paid his own fare back to Maryland where he began to unravel the chronicle of events. Fasel's lawyer confiscated his passport, effectively imprisoning him in Maryland for four months and making it impossible for him to return to the Netherlands when his children needed him the most.
With the help of the NCMEC and the FBI, Fasel is now back in the Netherlands, free to keep on abusing Yavelow's daughters, who, according to his sources, continue to be indoctrinated into the rituals of the three cults Fasel belongs to: Anthroposophy, Luong Minh Dang, and Wicca.
Her experience in America taught Fasel the advantages of a court hearing in which only she is present. Thus, she held another one-sided hearing in October and the decision was issued on November 2, 1999: The Dutch granted her request that Yavelow lose his parental rights, essentially ruling that he is no longer the father of his own children. They also gave her his house, office building, all his possessions, and remarkably, 100% of his income.
The Dutch court gave no reason for putting Christopher Yavelow out onto the street with only two suitcases to his name although they were considerably annoyed by the fact that Christopher and his daughters attended the English-speaking Baptist church in the Netherlands on Sunday mornings.
It has been more than 6 months since Christopher Yavelow has been able to contact his children.
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For more information:
Stolen Children Network:
http://www.StolenChildren.net/
Fact Sheet and Timeline:
http://www.StolenChildren.net/updates/FactSheet1.html
Yavelow Case Summary:
http://www.StolenChildren.net/updates/21Apr2000.html
Yavelow Family Website:
http://www.yavelow.com/
YAV's Business Website:
http://www.yav.com/