'Police did nothing to stop my son's abduction'

A father has filed a judicial protest against the Commissioner of Police for his failure to take action against his child’s mother for denying him access to his son, in defiance of a court order.

The judicial protest, filed by lawyer Stefano Filletti, states that the Family section of the Civil Court had delivered a sentence in October 2018, granting the father full access to the child, but the boy’s Moroccan mother had “repeatedly and without fail breached every one of the orders given by the court… without valid reason.”

The father had gone to the police to report her non-adherence to the court’s rulings several times, as her actions constituted a criminal offence. He had also filed a formal criminal complaint to the police on 15 March 2019.

But despite sending a number of emails, letters and meeting police officers involved in the case in an attempt to get things moving, the police did nothing, he says. No criminal charges were filed against the mother for breaching the court’s orders.

In the meantime, reads the protest, the man has not seen his son for over one year.  The woman is now understood to be living in Morocco, with the son.  

When he recently went to the police to check on what had been done following his criminal complaint from March he said he says he “was given contrasting versions as to what progress had been made and who was responsible for it.”

The last reply he received from the police was that he needed to file a new report because his original one was now time-barred.

But the only reason for the case being time-barred was the negligence and inaction of the police, says the father. This was a case which merited urgent action, where the mother was unabashedly ignoring, breaching and challenging the orders of the courts and despite several reports, a criminal complaint and contact, the police did nothing, he said and now the crime committed by the mother is time-barred.

This state of affairs was causing great damage to the father and was impinging on both his and his son’s fundamental human rights, reads the protest, which warns the Police Commissioner that he is being held responsible for these and any future damages suffered.