Police in Poland, despite the authority of the Irish and Polish courts, have refused to look for a three-year-old girl “kidnapped” in Ireland, Mr Justice Garrett Simons has been told in the High Court.
“For 544 days I have been forcibly separated from my daughter because of her abduction and the Irish Government’s failure to protect her rights and mine,” the distraught father, who cannot be identified, told Judge Simons.
“What makes this especially cruel is that I have not been passive. I have gone to court, travelled to Poland, stood with police and curators in 10 separate attempts to bring my daughter home,” he said.
He said every effort had been met with silence from the Irish Government and he had been left fighting alone against a foreign state that actively resists his daughter’s return while the Irish State, his daughter’s State, had abandoned them.
RM Block
The applicant was seeking orders directing the Taoiseach, the Minister for Justice and the Minister for Foreign Affairs to take steps to assist in the return of his daughter from Poland.
He said he lived with constant grief. “I wake each day with my daughter as my first thought and I fall asleep with her as my last,” he said. “The experience of helplessness is something no parent should have to endure.”
He told the court he had travelled to Poland and had attended at an address with Polish police who, when it turned out that neither his wife nor the child was there, told him: “You are on your own. We are not looking for her.”
He said a Polish court had given instructions to the police to locate the child but the Polish police were not interested. The child and her mother were “on the run”.
Judge Simons said it was a very unusual and a very important case but he had to apply fair procedures and time had to be given to the respondents to prepare a response. He told the girl’s father he was seeking a final order and there were legal issues that were very complex.
He adjourned the application, taken under the Hague Convention governing matters of kidnapping and abduction of children, until September 5th, granting the father leave to file written evidence regarding the motion he wished to bring on notice to the respondents.
