Prague, Jan 12 (CTK) – The Norwegian Child Welfare Service (Barnevernet) took a nine-month girl away from her Czech mother and Norwegian father because the parents allegedly had insufficient contact with the baby, a group supporting another Czech mother fighting for her sons in Norway told CTK yesterday.
Labour and Social Affairs Ministry will not comment on the case until the mother gives her consent to it, ministry spokesman Petr Haban said.
The Czech petition committee for support for the Czech Michalak family, from which two boys were taken in Norway in the past, said it had sent a report on the fresh case to Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka and President Milos Zeman.
“I believe that the materials are trustworthy enough and verified,” said Czech MP Jitka Chalankova (TOP 09), from the committee.
Chalankova said the family contacted her last Friday. On Christmas Eve, the parents first heard that their daughter would be taken away from them and permanently placed into a foster family, she said.
Barnevernet said the parents’ contact with the baby was not developed enough. The parents hired a lawyer in Norway and they were preparing an appeal against the decision.
“The authorities allegedly mind the insufficiently developed contact with the baby. They also reproached the parents for their statements, cited out of the context, that they would not like the baby to suffer,” the committee writes in a press release.
The mother is not in touch either with the Labour and Social Affairs Ministry whose Office for International Legal Protection of Children would solve the case, or with the Czech Embassy in Norway, Haban said.
“The mother turned to us with the case last November… We asked for background documents and we agreed to directly contact Barnevernet if she were interested in it. She said she would discuss the matter with her lawyer first. She did not react at all to our question whether we should enter the negotiations with Barnevernet,” Haban told CTK.
After the case was released yesterday, the ministry asked the mother again whether it can comment on the case.
“We do not intend to comment on it until her reaction, with respect to the family’s right to privacy,” Haban concluded.
The girl was born in Norway last April and had Czech citizenship, same as her mother.
The baby had to stay in hospital because of a serious genetical disease. She was on dialysis, waiting for a kidney transplant.
The parents regularly took their daughter home from hospital and doctors praised the family and asked Barnevernet to provide assistance to it, Chalankova said.
But Barnevernet also received a report from the superior of a nurse about whom the parents complained. “The superior has never seen the parents and the child welfare service has never visited the family,” Chalankova said.
She said the authorities wanted to move the baby to another hospital closer to the place where the selected foster family lives.
Chalankova said PM Sobotka would meet her over the case on Thursday.
The petition committee supports Eva Michalakova, a Czech mother trying to win back her two sons, aged ten and seven years now. Barnevernet took the boys away from her in 2011 on suspicion of abuse and neglect. The boys were placed into two different Norwegian foster families. Though the suspicion was not proved, the court considered the findings so serious to put the boys in foster care.
Last autumn, the Norwegian authorities decided to strip Michalakova of her parental rights and put the younger boy up for adoption. A Norwegian court will deal with her appeal in February.
Sobotka’s government has been repeatedly calling on Norway to respect the mother’s rights and reassess the case. Sobotka warned Norway some time ago that the case considerably burdened bilateral relations.
The petition committee said previously the steps by the Norwegian authorities in the cases of families from foreign countries like Romania, Poland, Slovakia and Lithuania have recently been challenged as well.
Norway has not officially commented on the Michalak case.
The embassy said it had no access to the information and that the Norwegian authorities would not comment on it either to respect the children’ privacy. However, the embassy said in its previous statements that Barnevernet would not take the boys from the family without a serious reason, which some media, referring to the case files, also indicated.
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