Only the hardest of the hard-hearted could fail to be moved by what happened to Sally Faulkner last May. After agreeing to allow her two young children, aged four and six, to travel to Beirut to holiday with their father, she was told by him, via Skype, that they were not coming home. Ms Faulkner had separated from her husband, Ali al-Amin, early in 2014, and what she did next, while perhaps understandable, invites bafflement and disbelief.
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Retaining the services of a company called Child Abduction Recovery International, Ms Faulkner travelled to Lebanon with CARI operatives to snatch the children on their way to school in suburban Beirut and smuggle them out of the country by boat, then back to Australia.
The mission's abject failure has generated media attention around the world, not only because it's a great human interest story but also because a Channel Nine film crew assigned to chronicle the escapade has been arrested as well. Ten people have either been detained or charged with the attempted abductions, including two British citizens, two Lebanese and a Romanian national. The most serious charges carry jail sentences of up to 20 years.
Cross-border child-custody battles are notoriously tangled and, in this case, there is the added complexity of cultural differences. Although Ms Faulkner apparently initiated the separation with her Lebanese husband, she seems not to have sought to formalise care and custody arrangements. One can understand, therefore, her grief and loss at being told the children would not be returned because Mr Amin wanted them brought up in his extended Lebanese family.
The Hague Abduction Convention, which is intended to facilitate the return of abducted children to their country of "habitual residence", was one avenue available to Ms Faulkner, albeit one that seems to have been beyond Ms Faulkner's financial reach. Moreover, Lebanon, is not a signatory. These salient facts seem to have informed Ms Faulkner's decision to contact Channel Nine.
If the saga had all the ingredients of good, prime-time television, Channel Nine's decision to involve itself to the extent of sponsoring a rescue mission defies easy or logical explanation. Mr Amin is well connected politically in Beirut, lives in a secure and well-patrolled neighbourhood, and apparently knew of the kidnap plans well beforehand. Channel Nine's failure to heed the warning bells is startling.
The only positive to emerge from this episode is that Ms Faulkner may escape jail time. Her husband says he's not going to press charges, and it's unlikely Lebanese authorities will risk a public backlash by detaining Ms Faulkner (who has a three-month-old baby in Brisbane) any longer than necessary. The outlook for the others is more problematic. Although not directly involved in the attempted abductions, the Channel Nine film crew stands accused of being criminal co-conspirators. Convictions for the CARI operatives and their hirelings seem inevitable, as public disapproval of child kidnapping is as strong in Lebanon as it is in Australia. What were they thinking?
