The Abduction of Celina and Stephanie
The Hague — January 15, 2001 — Having led Dutch authorities to believe that native-born American citizens, Celina (14) and Stephanie (12) Yavelow were Dutch, their Swiss mother, Monique Fasel, came to the United States with a Hague Convention request and a fraudulent document she claimed was a Dutch custody order.
To kidnap the American teenagers from their father, award-winning composer and author Christopher Yavelow, Fasel duped the National Center for Missing Children, who fueled a frenzied media manhunt, and the Maryland Courts, who she persuaded to “domesticate” a phony foreign order without inviting Yavelow or the children to the hearing.
Fasel, a Swiss millionaire who has made a mockery of both the US and Dutch legal systems, 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 Yavelow 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 infants. Finally, she influenced the FBI to place Yavelow on their “Ten Most Wanted” list.
On October 21, 1999, a SWAT team surrounded Yavelow and his daughters in Texas. In a heart-wrenching standoff, the two teenagers, who had spent more than half their lives in America, shielded their father pleading, “Our daddy has not kidnapped us. We are here of our own free will! We want to stay in America. We are American citizens!”
The FBI officers brutally imprisoned Yavelow, and unsuspectingly handed the children over to Fasel. She pretended to return to Maryland for the hearing that had been ordered, but instead kidnapped the children and fled with them to the Netherlands. In doing this, she defied a Maryland court order requiring her to stay in America, and she was able to avoid the required Hague Convention hearing which would certainly not have been in her favor.
When the US Central Authority (the Office of International Children’s Issues at the Department of State) requested that Fasel return to the U.S. for the Hague hearing, the Dutch Central Authority would not comply. Thus, the Dutch actively sought to aid Fasel in the kidnapping.
Swiss Kidnapper Finds Safe Haven in Holland
Through these actions Fasel violated the US International Parental Kidnapping Act (18 USC 1204), which makes it a crime to remove American children from the United States with the intent to obstruct a parent’s parental rights.
Fasel, an acknowledged pedophile, and the cults of which she is a member (Anthroposophy, Luong Minh Dang, and Wicca) continue to hold Celina and Stephanie Yavelow hostage and incommunicado while the children are completely de-Americanized. Yavelow has not been able to contact his children for more than 450 days.
Through video testimony and letters, Yavelow’s children have unceasingly asserted their wishes to return home to their father. Surprisingly, the Dutch courts ignored their testimony. In America for a summer vacation, Celina and Stephanie had repeatedly stated that being home in the US was “like a dream come true.” Taken to the airport four times in two months, they refused to return to the Netherlands.
The State Department’s Office of International Children’s Issues later revealed a fax from the Dutch authorities indicating Fasel had convinced them of the lie that the children were Dutch citizens. Likely they also believed that Fasel was Dutch due to her uncanny mastery of the language.
Chief Officer of NCMEC Comments
Throughout Fasel’s entire ruse, she was never asked to document any connection to the children. Legal loopholes in the 1988 Hague Convention treaty require the US to hand over American children to foreigners without verification of parental rights.
Referring to this loophole, John Rabun, chief officer of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children 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 America’s Stolen Children Network to help plug this loophole. StolenChildren.net, 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.
Passport Problems
Since Fasel’s abduction of Celina and Stephanie, she has done everything in her power to de-Americanize the children and to keep Yavelow out of Holland.
Although Fasel herself is guilty of parental child abduction according to the International Parental Kidnapping Act, she brazenly lied to American law enforcement agencies to have Yavelow himself charged with kidnapping.
This created a mountain of legal red tape that kept Yavelow, his passport confiscated, in the US for the 5 months when his terrified children needed him the most.
Back in the Netherlands
Yavelow arrived in the Netherlands on August 8, 2000, to discover that not only was Fasel holding his children hostage and incommunicado, she was also holding his house, office, and all his possessions hostage.
He had expected to attend a custody hearing in Amsterdam, scheduled for August 16, 2000. This was postponed until December 7. Four months is a long time for a child. Interestingly, when the Dutch sought to help legitimize Fasel’s kidnapping in October of 1999, they were able to schedule a hearing almost overnight.
Yavelow decided to move back into his abandoned house because Fasel hadn’t inhabited the house since January 4, 1999, when she abducted the children the first time. However, Fasel had convinced the local police that they were authorized to use deadly force to keep him out of his house. He slept in his car for most of the month it took his lawyer to resolve the effects of Fasel’s lies.
When he finally took legal possession of his house in mid-September, he discovered a mountain of mail that Fasel had hidden from him over the previous year. She had deliberately gone into debt for almost 30,000 guilders in his name. And, by ignoring bill payments she had engineered a half dozen judgments against his house, several of which had scheduled auctions.
The De-Americanization of the Teenagers
For the children, their house was an American oasis in the Netherlands. Born and raised in the United States, their 5 years at the family home in the Netherlands had been completely American— American food, American holidays, American friends, American books, American toys, American videos, American CDs, American CD-ROMs, American magazines, American computers, American appliances, everything American. Most of the house is on US 120-volt American electrical current.
Parent Alienation Syndrome
Fasel’s behavior is called Parent Alienation Syndrome (PAS) or Divorce-related Malicious Mother Syndrome (in Dutch: Ouderkindverstotingsyndroom), and Fasel has it bad. She is a textbook example of these psychological disorders.
The 400+ emails Yavelow sent his children during this period sit unopened in their email boxes which they are not allowed to check. Their 50 AOL pony chat buddies haven’t heard from them in more than a year. Their phone is unlisted, and the children are forbidden to contact anyone from their home country, The United States of America.
Although Celina and Stephanie are devout Christians, Fasel does not allow them to go to their church because it is an American church, and it is Christian, something that grates against her new age fanaticism. She forces them to attend a fiercely anti-Christian Anthroposophical school. In a true cult-like “circling of the wagons” no one connected with that school will allow any information to pass between the children and their father or other Americans.
This winter Yavelow learned more and more of the abuse his children have been subjected to in regular meetings with his daughters in allies, corridors, wooded paths, next to canals — wherever the three Americans can grab a precious 30 minutes to try to make up for the year that Fasel held them incommunicado.
ASCN Projects: “Children Helping Children”
Children helping children is the focus of a campaign launched on July 4, 2000, by America’s Stolen Children Network. The web sites, www.ChildrenHelpingChildren.com and www.BringTheChildrenHome.com, allow children to write a letter to Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands asking her to send Celina and Stephanie Yavelow back home to America.
The Stolen Children Network hopes their efforts will spur a rewrite of the Hague Convention Treaty. Although none of the other 50 nations who signed the treaty would ever use it against it’s own citizens, the United States routinely allows foreign countries to use the document as a powerful tool in kidnapping American children.
Yavelow comments: “The Hague treaty mandates that a child loses all rights to live in his or her home country if that child has spent more than 6 months in a foreign country. It can happen when a family travels overseas because of a temporary business transfer, a term in the military, or an educational fellowship, and one spouse wants to stay abroad. This is not what the people who wrote the treaty intended! It’s not a custody issue either, it’s an issue of human rights!”
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