LITHUANIANS living abroad must be better informed of the potential problems surrounding child custody when breaking up with foreign national partners, Lithuania’s children’s rights ombudsman has said.
Rimantė Šalaševičiūtė, speaking during a visit to Dublin last week, said that the situation of children who become the object of a parental tug-of-war across countries is something that children’s rights ombudsmen in Europe must examine more closely, given emigration trends across the continent. She added that Lithuania would host an international conference on child abduction this November.
Referring to the recent case of a Lithuanian woman who lost custody of her daughter to the girl’s German father two years after she had been brought to Lithuania from Germany, Šalaševičiūtė said there are growing instances of Lithuanian women who break up with foreign partners in western Europe and return to Lithuania with the children.
“And then there are claims and legal suits under the Hague convention [on child abduction] against those mothers that they stole or abducted the children,” she explained.
“We are now investigating three situations like this at our institute. I have spoken to the Lithuanian prime minister and we are going to hold a conference in November, an international conference, on child abduction. And this will partly be aimed at women, trying to explain to them that they should be careful when they consider an international marriage.”
No incident involving Ireland is being investigated, she confirmed. Meanwhile, Šalaševičiūtė, who was in Dublin attending a meeting of children’s rights ombudsmen from across Europe, credited Ireland’s Lithuanians as key players behind Lithuania’s recent changes to dual citizenship laws.
She said the adoption into law of dual citizenship rights for children born to Lithuanians abroad was largely down to pressure from emigrant Lithuanians, and that those in Ireland had been the “initiators of the process”. It is understood that the Lithuanian Association in Ireland had been lobbying their home government about the issue.
Previously, Lithuanian parents of children born abroad had had to choose whether to accord their children the citizenship of their birth or parental country.
Šalaševičiūtė, who spoke to Metro Éireann through an interpreter, also responded to questions on the controversy she sparked in Ireland last year in relation to the treatment of Lithuanian children here, which she says number up to 30,000 (the discredited CSO figure for the total number of Lithuanians in Ireland, as recorded in 2006, stands at just over 24,000).
Following a fact-finding visit last summer, Šalaševičiūtė had told the Lithuanian daily newspaper Lietuvos Rytas that Lithuanian children in Ireland were being prevented from speaking Lithuanian with their siblings in schools, and that in one unidentified Irish town, Lithuanian teenagers were beaten up because they were ‘more beautiful’ than their Irish counterparts. The comments were met with a strong rebuke from Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs at the time.
However, Šalaševičiūtė defended the controversial remarks, and said her main point concerned language rights.
Remarking that she didn’t consider her statements as controversial, she told Metro Éireann: “I just presented the results of a major research that was carried out in Lithuania, and I raised the issue of discrimination against our children resident in Ireland on the subject of their language.”
She said an incident she had referred to regarding two Lithuanian sisters new to Ireland, who had been prevented from speaking Lithuanian to one another in school, had not been an isolated case.
“They had just arrived and they were reprimanded and got lower marks because they spoke Lithuanian between themselves. And it wasn’t just a one-off example, there were others.
“Obviously this was a subject I was the first to raise,” she continued, “because I got phone calls from a French news agency, from Reuters, from the BBC, from other mass media, and something that the Irish ambassador in Lithuania mentioned to me is that newspapers in China and central Asia mentioned [the issue]… which shows that this is a vital, important question for those countries that have quite a few families emigrating to live in other countries.”
She said she was “quite proud and pleased to report” that following the meeting with the Irish ambassador to Lithuania, Dónal Denham, “very positive and very prompt steps were taken to improve the situation. For example a questionnaire was circulated among Lithuanian children in Ireland to find out what it is that is missing, improvements they would like to see, and the most important and best thing about it is that now I have absolutely no complaints anymore.”
However, she added that research sponsored by the department of national minorities and Lithuanians living abroad had found that 70 per cent of returned or current Lithuanian emigrants say there is some level of discrimination against their children when based overseas.
Emigration remains a sensitive issue in Lithuania, and Šalaševičiūtė admitted that although there is evidence of people returning, it is “not as many as we’d like to see”.
She concluded: “I am extremely happy to hear and grateful to your President [Mary McAleese] when she said today that steps are being taken to make sure that immigrant children have absolutely equal rights with Irish children.”
