Let Ashcroft Do It: Trying to recover abducted kids.(proposal to give Department of Justice responsibility for US children abducted abroad)

'Austria?" President Bush asked when Tom Sylvester requested his help for "our American stolen children" -- including his only child, Carina, who was abducted to Austria by her mother in 1995 when she was a year old. After expressing his surprise at the complicity of a friendly European country in international abduction, Bush encouraged Sylvester to tell his story because "a lot of people are watching."

The heartbroken father has been tirelessly telling his story for seven years. (See my "Without Their Daughters," May 20.) Sylvester's brief encounter with the president in early October, at a White House conference on missing children, followed a private meeting he had had in June with secretary of state Colin Powell, and a personal appeal on his behalf in July by the U.S. ambassador in Austria to the Austrian justice minister. Sylvester had also previously met with former secretary of state Madeleine Albright. But despite all the top-level sympathetic attention, after these seven years, Tom Sylvester concludes that "as a practical reality, Carina's not coming back."

As a practical reality, Carina and hundreds of other American children will remain separated from their parents as long as the primary responsibility for these international criminal cases remains with the State Department. The reason for this is simple: The unavoidable competing demands of international relations make it impossible for the State Department to elevate the rights of American parents and their children above its most pressing concern -- good relations with foreign governments. To better guarantee the rights of individual citizens, responsibility for international abduction cases should be transferred to the Justice Department.

One of the proponents for such a transfer is Michael Horowitz, who heads the Project for Civil Justice Reform and the Project for International Religious Liberty at the Hudson Institute. Horowitz points out that, while the State Department's institutional culture seeks to reduce irritants that might interfere with good international relationships, the Justice Department could be expected to have a "client-centered" approach. Justice, he says, could represent American parents whose children have been taken abroad in violation of international treaties as vigorously as foreign governments currently defend their citizen-abductors. Horowitz, who has successfully put together coalitions to force State Department action on religious persecution and international sex trafficking, vows that a similar coalition of interest groups committed to the rights of American parents "will be ready for this battle in the next Congress."

Even a transfer to the Department of Justice wouldn't automatically guarantee better results for American parents, who currently win the return of their children in fewer than 20 percent of the thousand cases a year reported to the State Department. While the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has helped to see that over 90 percent of children abducted to the United States are returned, the State Department has failed to act effectively on behalf of children abducted from it. Tom Sylvester would hope to see an improvement if the Justice Department worked with the National Center on "outgoing" cases and issued transparent, regular reports on the status of cases to Congress.

Sylvester notes that it took him four years and a federal lawsuit to get needed documents on his daughter's case from the State Department, and he would welcome a Justice Department review of foreign laws that frustrate the clear aims of the Hague Convention on international abduction. Sylvester had won an initial order for Carina's return from Austria's highest court; but owing to the inability of Austrian courts to enforce civil court orders, Carina remained in Austria, and an Austrian court eventually awarded custody to Sylvester's former wife. Her father is now permitted only a couple of supervised visits a year.