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 -- A 6-year-old Cuban boy who wants to stay in America can call the shots for the US government. At almost the same time, Celina and Stephanie Yavelow, two native-born American teenagers, 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, without charging him. 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.
Complicating matters is the fact that psychotherapists who examined Fasel in America and Holland, and the children as recently as June, 1999, confirmed that she sexually abuses them. Further, she is active in three organizations considered to be cults by many. The children continue to be held incommunicado in violation of the UN Treaty on the Rights of the Child.
Legal loopholes in the 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." According to a September 1999 Readers' Digest exposé, 13,000 American children have fallen through such loopholes since 1977.
To help plug this loophole, left-behind parent and grieving father Christopher Yavelow this week launched the Stolen Children Network.
StolenChildren.net provides information and 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 Yavelow(14) and Stephanie Yavelow (11), both native-born American citizens, who had spent more than half their lives in the US prior to their abduction.
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 informed her he was taking the matter to the authorities. Before he could do so, she abducted them to the home of her Wicca high priestess for two months. Eventually, Stephanie escaped and returned to her father.
From January through July 1999, Yavelow and his children fought with the Dutch legal system to set parental access schedules. This is relatively new for the Netherlands, where it wasn't until 1990 that fathers were granted any parental visitation rights at al, and shockingly, is was not until 1998 that the joint custody policy was incoporated into the laws! Through video testimony and letters to the judge, his children unceasingly asserted their wishes to return home to their father. In contravention to Dutch law, the courts ignored their testimony. (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.)
Yavelow complained to the Palace of Justice in the Hague. He demanded that the local court uphold the country's laws mandating 50-50 access for both parents. In retaliation, when his older daughter wrote a letter begging the judge to consider her testimony, and her father provided psychologists' reports confirming the accusations of incest, 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!" This, despite the fact that Christopher has indisputably been the children's primary care-giver for the past 5 years as their mother was absent well over 50 hours every week.
Around the same time and following a 5-year investigation, the Netherlands, where the family had been living, was being branded with the world's most deplorable record of child abuse by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child.
Christopher determined there were no legal reasons to stay in Holland and that it would in the children's best interests to come home. The children expressed dreams of attending American schools and churches, having American friends, and speaking English, their native language.
They arrived in the US on September 1, 1999, and made their way to the Pacific Northwest where they had pre-arranged housing, schooling, and a custody hearing. The children repeatedly declared that being home in America was "a dream come true!"
Shortly before Christopher and his children 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), however, they were never given the hearing assured them by the Hague treaty. Bill Flemming of the State Department's Office of International Children's Issues later disclosed to Yavelow that the Dutch authorities had been led to believe the children were Dutch citizens, not US citizens.
Using a fraudulent English translation, Fasel and her lawyer Susan Elgin duped Maryland's Baltimore County Circuit Judge John O. Hennegan into believing that a temporary access schedule, which has no legal force even in the Netherlands, was a custody order. Without contacting the father or children and disregarding that Maryland had no jurisdiction over the Yavelow family, Hennegan "domesticated" the bogus document into a Maryland Custody Order for the mother.
Fasel built a devastating house of cards upon the spurious custody order: She obtained parental child abduction warrants for Yavelow's arrest and, using the warrants to bolster her credibility, she listed him with INTERPOL, the NCIC, and the NCMEC. She convinced newspapers such as the Baltimore Sun to devote extensive inflammatory coverage to her fabrications. She appeared on television with 6-year-old videos falsely portraying Yavelow's teenage daughters as preschoolers. Finally, she influenced the FBI to place Yavelow on their "Ten Most Wanted" list.
Meanwhile, Christopher, Celina, and Stephanie were unaware of Fasel's deception. When they reached Minnesota, a chance telephone call alerted them of the hoax, so they went to Alabama, one of three states with laws designed to prevent such schemes by foreign parents.
The Yavelows settled in Fairhope, Alabama, met with realtors to find a house, and joined a church. He took the children to register for school. After the school tour Celina declared, "this is what I've always dreamed of, to go to an American high school... with lockers and everything. It's like a dream come true." 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 lawyer in Maryland by telephone from Texas came the Yavelow's confrontation with the FBI. 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. She pretended to return to Maryland but instead abducted them to the Netherlands, herself violating the same Maryland court order she had used to obtain the arrest warrants for Yavelow -- she had been ordered to turn over all passports and appear in Maryland for a hearing.
Meanwhile, Yavelow sat in a Texas jail for 6 days without being charged. When he was released 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 arranged the confiscation of his passport, effectively imprisoning him in Maryland for four months and making it impossible for him to return to Holland to rescue his children when they needed him the most.
With the help of the US government, the NCMEC, and the FBI, Fasel is now back in Holland. She is free to continue her sexual and mental abuse of Yavelow's daughters, who, according to Yavelow's sources, are now being brainwashed and indoctrinated into the new-age rituals of Anthroposophy, Luong Minh Dang, and Wicca, and likely having their Dutch paperwork altered to state they are not American citizens. Fasel was caught doing this before.
From her American experience Fasel learned the advantages of a court hearing in which the other parties are not present. Except for the initial informal access schedule hearings, Yavelow has yet to see a judge on either side of the Atlantic.
Keeping with this strategy, she had another one-sided hearing in the Netherlands in October and the decision was issued on November 2, 1999: The Dutch courts gave full custody to Fasel. They granted her request that Yavelow lose his parental rights, essentially ordering that he is no longer the father of his children.
She requested and was given his house although she has not set foot in it since 1998 because it reminds the children of their father. She also obtained his office (a separate building), and all his possessions including his valuable computer music studio, his grand piano, all his music, his writings, his library, master recordings of his works, his curricula, and his collection of paintings including those by his parents, both artists.
Although Yavelow had provided the court with statements from Fasel's suspicious numbered Swiss accounts that he discovered after she left, the courts awarded Fasel 100% of Yavelow's income. Welcome to socialism!
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 or anyone outside of Fasel's cults has been able to contact his children.
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1,600 words
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/
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