There have been many cases where Iranian fathers have deserted their foreign wives and gone back to Iran with their children. The foreign wives get no help from the Iranian courts, which invariably side with the father.
In this case, the courts in Iran stuck with the father even though he was a foreigner and would remove the children not just from Iranian society but from Iranian culture as well.
Iranian law normally allows the mother to have custody of young children but turns them over to the father as they get older. In this case, both children had passed the legal age and would normally be turned over to an Iranian father.
Dany Laurent, from the eastern French city of BesanÁon, was reunited with his children this month despite his fears that tension between France and Iran could present an insurmountable obstacle.
Laurent’s former wife, Fatemah, who was, like him, a French schoolteacher, took Diane, now 12, and her brother, Etienne, now 9, to Iran in 2006 in defiance of a French court order that awarded him custody.
The outcome has left Lau-rent full of praise for Iranian justice.
An Iranian judge in Karaj, the home of Fatemah’s family, decided not to close the case to the mother’s benefit after hearing the pleadings of Laurent and his Franco-Iranian lawyer.
The judge, recalling his experience during the Iran-Iraq war, told him: “You are not a Muslim but, when I was a prisoner in Iraq, my life was saved by a Christian Iraqi doctor. You’re a human being, a father searching for his children and I will do my duty.”
Fatemah was convicted by the Karaj court of illegally bringing the children into the country, a decision that significantly raised Laurent’s hopes of being reunited with them. Four months later, in mid-June, they were traced to Karaj.
His former wife faced three years in jail but Laurent, 54, followed the same judge’s suggestion not to seek her imprisonment.
There was still a stumbling block. Laurent’s lawyer warned that police would not hand over children being brought up as Muslims to a non-Muslim. He then converted to Islam.
Laurent contrasts the treatment he received in Iran with the way he sees the case was handled in France.
He said he had little help from the French authorities, even though both children had French nationality and were in state care pending a gradual return to paternal custody as ordered by the courts.
Fatemah had accused him of sexually molesting and harming their daughter, a charge rejected by the courts as baseless.
The mother took advantage of unsupervised access to plan her departure. She obtained passports for the children and visas from the Iranian consulate across the Swiss border in Bern. She then flew with them to Tehran from Geneva.
Laurent said he took heart from his understanding that, in the event of marital break-up, Iranian law automatically assigned custody to the father once any child reached the age of seven.
However, he was concerned that strained Franco-Iranian relations and his status as a westerner would count against him.
In France there were also setbacks, even though a court ruling five months after the abduction awarded full custody to Laurent, leading to a warrant being sent to Iran by the international police agency, Interpol.
A letter to Jacques Chirac, then president, went unanswered, Laurent said. The next president, Nicolas Sarkozy, offered sympathy but no more. After publicity about Laurent’s campaign, he was seen by a regional official in Besancon, “not to help me but to threaten legal action if I continued to criticize his inaction.”––
“I experienced [Iranian] judges who were more humane and conscientious than certain French judges,” he told the newspaper Le Monde.
The children did not attend school in Iran but had some home education. Despite having left the country of their birth seven years ago, they speak French, though Diane’s command of the language is stronger.
Laurent realizes he faces another stiff task as he helps them readjust to life in France without their mother.
Diane was in tears when she telephoned her mother after arriving back in France. Her father says the first night was hard and that it will take time to heal the scars left by long separation.
Father and daughter have already been busy looking online at schools she and her brother may attend from September. Diane misses Iran and moans that there seems “nothing to do” in Besancon, while admitting that she has barely been there two weeks. Etienne is much quieter but plays contentedly with his toys.
Despite the court decisions against his former wife, Laurent knows she commands the children’s affection. “I am reluctant to speak for them but, while they naturally miss her, they have also said they are happy to be with me again,” he said. He believes his wife married him to gain French residential rights rather than for love.
But he says relations with her have improved after he regained custody. He wants contact to be maintained and hopes all remaining proceedings against her in France are dropped, allowing her to visit.