Parents deported to Turkey, three small children left in Frankfurt
A Kurdish couple were flown from Frankfurt to Turkey on Monday 3 August without their three children, who remain in the care of the city's youth welfare office. The children are three years old, eighteen months and five months. Their parents' custody had been suspended only provisionally, and that question is still not settled.
Much of this turned on procedure rather than any final ruling. In February a family court withdrew custody provisionally in an emergency hearing. The mother, then heavily pregnant with the third child, says she asked for the date to be moved and that the request never reached the court. Neither parent has yet answered the allegations in person. On 30 June the youth welfare office took all three children into care, citing clear indications they were at risk. In early July, after an argument at a second appointment there, the mother was taken straight into deportation detention.
An administrative court then rejected an urgent application against the deportation, reasoning that regulated contact between parents and children was not to be expected in the foreseeable future. The Hessian interior ministry says the couple no longer had a right of residence and were required to leave, and that the youth office had confirmed serious neglect and an unwillingness to cooperate. The family's lawyer, thirty years in practice, says she has never seen a case like it.
The decisive date is 21 August, when the family court in Frankfurt holds the main hearing that will finally settle custody and contact. The parents will not be in the room. The ministry says they can approach the youth office from Turkey through the Federal Foreign Office; the Hessian Refugee Council says proving your fitness as a parent from another country is in practice impossible, and that permanent separation is now the likely outcome.
If you are in a custody or child-protection procedure, never let a court date pass without responding, and get a lawyer before the first hearing rather than after. A provisional decision taken while you are absent can be very hard to undo. Ask for an interpreter in writing if you need one.