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Tomas Zdechovsky, MEP for the Czech Republic, hosted this remarkable Round Table discussion with the following speakers:

PANEL I: EU Response to protection of children’s rights

Mairead McGuinness, MEP for Ireland, is a Vice-President of the EU Parliament, has been a member of the Petitions Committee and supports Missing Children Europe

• with her 10-minute speech culminating in “the issue is above the radar.”

Cecilia Wikstrom, MEP for Sweden, is the current Chair of the Petitions Committee and was a priest before her political career in Sweden and Brussels

• and her 10 minutes admitting the problems plainly.

Tatjana Zdanoka, MEP for Latvia, has experience with cases from seven countries and set up www.savethefamily.eu for Russian speakers

• and her 10 minutes focussing on Article 51 in the Lisbon Treaty as a major stumbling block, but also making the constructive proposal of an official study
• this would complement the amateur version of Non-UK Kids in UK Social Care, discovering 6,500 foreign children accounted for in the UK system. But how many are NOT recorded???

PANEL II: Consequences and impact of the current system on children

My contribution opened the grievances on behalf of parents and children,

• focussing on the UK and mentioning Germany, after I met the psychologist who has over 1,000 cases on file;
• she said that official figures quote 3,900 forced adoptions, but Parliamentarians had come to claim there are none!

JUDr Marica Pirosikova is a pan-European agent of the Slovak Government at the European Court of Human Rights and got Slovakia to join the proceedings in the case of the Boor boys who were returned after 920 days in ‘care’.

• her 10 minutes and comments point to judgements made by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg that can be used as precedence which we are working on!

Ruby Harrold-Claesson is a Swedish solicitor and Chair of the Nordic Committee on Human Rights whom I met at the first International Conference in Prague last year:

• her 10 minutes mentioned a number of the children who would still be alive if they had not been taken into care!

Stina Toft, children and family counsellor, Denmark.

• her statement is short, because she can’t talk about this subject without crying…
• A Social Worker said to her “we take children because we can…”

Marius Reikeras, the human rights lawyer from Norway who had been imprisoned for 60 days, but was released after 30 days, for he helped too many prisoners:

• his short talk about the demo in Oslo and the Norwegian Government breaching human rights
• the Norwegian Ambassador had a very different picture!

Here are

• the first 15 minutes of discussion
• with this statement by Bulgarian Emil Radev MEP
• and a second period of discussion.

As outcomes,

• we are forming “Human Rights in Action” as a Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) that consists of European solicitors in its core group and an alliance of  likeminded NGOs with the launch of this book as the next milestone;
• so many more MEPs are now aware that they are aiming at a debate in a Plenary Session;
• meanwhile, questions for oral and written answers are being formulated;
• collaboration with the EU Commission has been ‘forced’ upon us, because we were refused access to their Annual Forum on Child Rights, with rather indefensible reasons. Watch this space!