They Are My Children, Too: A Mother's Struggle for Her Sons

Now the wife of Christopher Meyer, British ambassador to the U.S., the author has attracted media attention to her four-year struggle to regain access to her two sons. The author contends that in 1994, her former husband, Hans-Peter Volkmann, a German doctor, violated a legal separation agreement by refusing to return nine-year-old Alexander and seven-year-old Constantin to their London home after they spent a six-week holiday with him in Germany. Meyer's account details the roadblocks she met in German courts often staffed by judges she felt were more sympathetic to the children's German father than to her, a British citizen of French and Russian extraction. Meyer was initially able to obtain court orders for the return of her children, but she claims that Volkmann hid the boys until a higher German court upheld his appeal on the grounds that it was in the children's best interests to remain in Germany. She also details the agreements Volkmann apparently made and broke for her court-ordered visits to her sons. According to Meyer, her ex-husband brainwashed their sons into thinking that their mother had abandoned them. Although the trauma Meyer has suffered as a parent is indisputably intense, her defensive descriptions of the early marital disagreements she had with Volkmann are unnecessary and do little to illuminate her tragic situation. In the end, though, the author makes a strong case for enforcement of the Hague Convention on Child Abduction, which prohibits kidnapping across frontiers. (May)