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TOKYO : Envoys of eight countries were due Friday to meet Japan's justice minister to press Tokyo to sign a treaty to prevent international parental child abductions, a diplomatic source said.
The long-simmering issue was thrown into stark focus when Japanese police last month arrested a US man after he snatched his two children from his Japanese ex-wife on their way to school to take them to an American consulate.
The Tennessee man, Christopher Savoie, 38, who was released Thursday, said he had tried to take his children in an act of desperation after his Japanese wife took them away from their US home and denied him access to them.
The case highlighted the usual practice of Japanese courts awarding child custody in divorce cases to just one parent, usually the mother, rather than reaching joint custody agreements with parental visitation rights.
Japanese courts also habitually side with the Japanese parent in an international custody dispute -- sometimes even awarding a child's Japanese grandparents custody rights over a foreign parent.
Several foreign countries with citizens facing similar situations have urged Tokyo to sign an international treaty that aims to rectify the situation, most recently in a joint statement by four western countries in May.
Japan, alone among G7 countries, has not signed the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, which obliges countries to return a child wrongfully kept there to their country of habitual residence.
On Friday, Justice Minister Keiko Chiba was due to meet the ambassadors of Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Italy, New Zealand, Spain and the United States to discuss the issue, a French diplomatic source said.
Activist groups estimate that over the years up to 10,000 dual-citizenship children in Japan have been prevented from seeing a foreign parent.
The United States has said it has listed cases of more than 100 children abducted by a parent from the United States and taken to Japan.
In the Savoie case, a Tennessee court found earlier this year that his former wife Noriko had kidnapped and taken to Japan their eight-year-old son and six-year-old daughter and issued an arrest warrant for her.
However, that ruling carried no legal weight in Japan.
Savoie was arrested on September 28 outside the US consulate in Japan's southwestern Fukuoka city on suspicion of kidnapping, but he was released by prosecutors on Thursday without charges being filed.
Activist groups say they hope that Japan's new centre-left government of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama -- which took power last month after more than half a century of almost unbroken conservative rule -- will review the issue.
- AFP /ls
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