Having led Dutch authorities to believe that native-born and raised American citizens, Celina (14) and Stephanie (12) Yavelow were Dutch citizens, their Swiss mother, Monique Fasel, came to the US with a Hague Convention request and a fraudulent document she claimed was a Dutch custody order. To kidnap the children, she duped the National Center for Missing Children (who fueled a frenzied media manhunt), the Maryland Courts (who domesticated the phony foreign order), and the FBI (who wasted a fortune tracking composer/author Christopher Yavelow and his children).
On October 21, 1999, a SWAT team surrounded the family. 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!" Then, to avoid the Hague Convention hearing, and in defiance of a court order requiring Fasel to stay in America, everyone looked the other way as she kidnapped the children and fled to the Netherlands.
At Fasel's request, the Dutch had stripped the father's parental rights earlier in October (1999). Thus, Fasel violated that International Parental Kidnapping Act which makes it a crime to remove American children from the United States with the intent to obstruct a parent's parental rights. Fasel and the cults of which she is a member continue to hold Celina and Stephanie Yavelow hostage and incommunicado while the children are completely de-Americanized.
Fasel was able to prevent Yavelow from returning to the Netherlands for a year, but he came back to the Netherlands in August, 2000, to appeal the ruling. The hearing was postponed until December 7. The judges questioned Yavelow and Fasel for 5 minutes, and delivered a decision on January 29, 2001, tentatively upholding the stripping of Yavelow's parental rights. The reason given: "He writes letters to his children and wants to see them every day." They will make a decision in 2001, about whether to permenantly strip the parental rights of this loving father, for simply wanting to be a father to his children.
Christopher was not able to contact his children for 420 days as of December 14, 2000.
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