SUOMI OIKEUSVALTIO????

Järjettömältä toiminnaltahan se kuulostaa, mutta minkäs teet, kun laki on laki. Mutta uskon, että tämä tapaus herättää lakiuudistusta ja pykälien tarkennusta. Onneksi.

mikä olisi tärkeämpää kuin kissojen oikeudet? (paitsi omani...)

Kyllähän asia on sillä tavalla, että Suomessa pitää noudattaa tuomioistuimen päätöksiä. Olisi kaikki mennyt helpommin mikäli lapsia ei olisi piilotettu. Kun nyt käsi pelattiin loppuun asti ei viranomaisille jäänyt muuta mahdollisuutta kuin toimia. Virka-apupyyntö poliisille ja sen mukainen toiminta johti haluttuun lopputulokseen. Mutta kuten sanoin, olisi samaan tulokseen päässyt paljon pienemmälläkin draamalla.

Tuskin Jettis tai kukaan muukaan tällä palstalla tietää, millaisia vanhempia Outi Koski ja ex-miehensä oikeasti ovat. Outi Kosken mediassa kertoma versio ei tosiaan ole välttämättä se totuus. Hänellä kun on tässä pikkuisen oma lehmä ojassa niin sanoakseni.

Tuskin kukaan täällä kykenee mediassa esitettyjen tietojen pohjalta myöskään päättämään mikä olisi pojille paras ratkaisu. Oikeuden tehtävä on kaivaa faktat ja totuus esiin ja tehdä ratkaisu pelkästään faktojen pohjalta, ei sen kumpi osapuolista itkee isompia krokotiilinkyyneliä iltapäivälehtien sivuilla.

Poikien oma halu ei tässä myöskään riitä todistusaineistoksi. Lapsia on kohtuullisen helppo (etenkin jomman kumman vanhemmista) manipuloida, etenkin jos saa pitää heitä yksinään hallussa noinkin stressaavassa tilanteessa kuin Outi Koski on saanut.

Kuten sanoin, oikeus tekee lopullisen päätöksen. Täytyy tässä vain todeta, että Koski ei vaikuta järin tasapainoiselta vanhemmalta. Asioiden hoitaminen kaappaamalla lapset ja käymällä oikeutta iltapäivälehtien sivuilla ei anna kuvaa vastuuntuntoisesta vanhemmasta. Pojille ei varmasti tuollainen piileskely, pakoilu, mediahässäkkä ja oikeudelliset voimatoimet (joihin syyllinen ei ole oikeuslaitos, eikä poliisi, vaan Outi Koski, joka ei totellut oikeuden määräyksiä) ole tehnyt hyvää.

Jettiksen logiikan mukaan nyt kenellä tahansa vanhemmalla, joka on mielestään tullut huoltajuuskiistassa kaltoin kohdelluksi, on oikeus kaapata lapsensa, viedä heidät pois kotimaastaan ja pakoilla ja piileksiä oikeuslaitokselta (aiheuttaen näin mahdolliset ikuiset traumat lapsille). Ainut edellytys tietenkin tällaiselle toiminnalle on, että osaa itkeä mahdollisimman vakuuttavasti mediassa. Näinhän ne asiat oikeusvaltiossa hoidetaan eikö?

Tässä on kysymys ihan normaalista vedättämisestä, jonka vain nainen osaa. Nyt kohteena ovat viranomaiset ja media. Uskokaa vaan, Koskelle ja hänen tukijoilleen ei tule laittomasta toiminnastaan mitään rangaistusta. Pääsevät kuin koirat veräjästä.
Koneiston vedättäminen tulee myös tolkuttoman kalliiksi. Meille muille jää taas laskun maksajan osa.. Mykistävää.

OCTOBER 20, 2004
Helsinki Heartbreak
John Rogers' willingness to share child custody with his ex-wife backfired, and court orders in both Finland and Greenville County have yet to bring him back together with his two sons.

BY JAMES SHANNON

   
John Rogers is an Upstate chemical engineer who left his heart in Helsinki, but it wasn't his idea. In a twisted tangle of international intrigue and old-fashioned post-marital cruelty, Rogers continues a bitter struggle to regain custody of his sons, 13-year-old Alex and 9-year-old Jake, now hidden somewhere in a distant country whose legal system has left him frustrated and confused.

When the extensive travel for his job took Rogers to Finland in the late 1980s, the divorced father of two met and married Outi Koski, a woman some ten years his junior. Asked years later what had attracted him to Outi initially, Rogers is frank. "Probably her looks and her figure," he recalls. "She was attracted to me, and yes, she is an educated, worldly woman."

The marriage produced two sons: Alex, born in 1991; and Jake, born in 1994. The family made their home in Mauldin with Rogers' son and daughter from his previous marriage - Christie, now 23 and a student in dental school at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, and Johnny, now 21 and a senior at Clemson University. According to Rogers, his first two children were active participants in raising their little brothers. "My daughter and son changed more diapers combined on Jake and Alex than my wife Outi ever did," he says. But the marriage was a tumultuous one, marked by separations and strife before a divorce action filed by John Rogers finally landed the couple in Family Court.

It is not necessary to rehash details of their divorce here, but the case never went to trial. "I represented John in his divorce against Outi," says Greenville attorney Stephen Henry. "On the day of the hearing, she settled the case for joint custody with John being the primary placement parent." Henry notes that John Rogers was willing for the boys to spend time with their mother because he believes children need both of their parents.

"One of the key provisions in the order was the summer vacation issue, where she was entitled to some summer vacation with the children over in Finland," says Henry. "The important part for this case now was that she was supposed to have the children back in time for school." As the summer of 2003 was coming to an end, the time arrived for the boys to return so they could begin the new school year. Both Alex and Jake had been educated in the Greenville County public schools up until that time.

Henry picks up the story again. "Then the excuses started coming as to why they weren't returned," he says. "And finally, they just didn't come." This was over two years after the original court order that granted shared custody to both parents.

"Once he realized they weren't coming back, we went back to Family Court... got an order where Judge Bartlett granted emergency relief to John, gave him sole custody, held her in contempt and issued a pickup order," says Henry.

John Rogers was devastated by the loss of the boys who had been so woven into the fabric of his life. "I took them to school every day, I picked them up from school every day," he says. "I would participate with them in things at their school."

And now they were gone, beyond his reach. Rogers hired a lawyer in Finland to press his case there, even as his wife continued to offer excuses. "My ex kept saying she wasn't trying to stay there long term; that her mother was sick; that she was dying of cancer; she was terminal; it would be just another few weeks or months," he says. "But this had been an ongoing theme for seven years, so I didn't believe it."

Another apparent part of his ex-wife's strategy involved limiting phone contact between Rogers and his sons. "The last time I had talked to my son Alex, who is now 13, was the day he turned 12. When he turned 12 on August 9, 2003, I said, 'Alex, what is going on? You were supposed to be home two weeks ago.' He said, 'Dad, I don't know. I keep asking Mom and she won't tell me.'"

Rogers says Outi soon halted any communication between him and his family in Finland. "When I would call, she would hang up or turn the cell phone off... Then one day, I got a fax from her saying, 'If you want to talk to the boys, call between 8 and 9 am tomorrow, your time.' So I keep calling, calling, calling and there's no answer. She was sitting at a police station saying I was harassing her on the phone and letting them see how much the phone rang without telling them she had sent the fax."

Rogers says his ex-wife used those telephone calls to file harassment charges against him, charges that would later be dismissed after he showed the fax to the police officer who had witnessed the other end of the calls in Finland. The education of John Rogers was just beginning, however. Before long, he would gain firsthand experience with the pros and cons of two tricky international treaties. The first was the Hague Convention on Child Abduction, an agreement binding the United States and some 50 other countries to respect each other's custody orders and return children unlawfully taken across international borders. Even under the Hague Convention, however, the case may still be litigated in the country where the child is living.

"I discovered Finland has a bizarre legal system when this Hague case was submitted by my attorney there," says Rogers. "My ex has claimed I'm this abusive guy, and that's why she's moved there - to get the children out of this." Rogers points to the South Carolina Department of Social Services as an aggressive agency, reasoning that if his ex-wife had made those allegations here, "they would have been on me like stink on a horse pile. Certainly, I have never done anything to any of my kids." Instead, he was forced to defend himself against allegations made an ocean away.

Even with her home court advantage, Outi was not able to keep Rogers completely away from his children - but she didn't make it easy. "When I finally went back to Finland, the only place I could see my kids was in a shelter for battered women," he says. What he was not able to accomplish was having the boys returned to him as ordered by the Family Court in Greenville, an order that was legally binding under the Hague Convention. Couldn't he just tell his lawyer to go into court in Finland and ask a judge to turn over the boys?

"I asked that question 4,000 times, and the answer was no," he says. "I think their courtrooms are dusty there, because they hardly ever use them." With his custody order in hand, Rogers returned to Finland in March, 2004, accompanied by his brother and adult son to give Jake and Alex a chance to come home. He describes what happened next.

"We found the boys walking to a bus stop to go to school," he says. "They got in the car with us willingly. We drove up the west coast of Finland and into Sweden." Rogers describes a trip with the boys where bonds with their father and brother were reestablished. "We went to the US Embassy in Stockholm and got US passports for the boys. They were doing great all this time. I asked them, 'Why are you telling people that I am abusive?' The boys said, 'Dad, we never said that. These doctors keep saying that and we don't know why.'"

Rogers' voice grows soft as he recalls that happy interlude with his sons. "They had a great time. That night, we went to the Hard Rock Cafe in Stockholm. The next day, we fly into Paris and get pulled out of line at Charles DeGaulle airport. They have an order, a Schengen order, and an Interpol arrest warrant for me. I was basically right up on the terrorist list, described as armed and dangerous - a danger to my kids."

The Schengen order represented the second international treaty Rogers tripped over in his quest for his sons. Simply put, most countries in the European Union entered into an agreement that would simplify transit across the borders between them, named for the town in Luxembourg where the first agreements were signed. When there is a dispute among the signatory countries, it is immediately resolved in favor of the nation where the dispute arose.

French police turned the boys over to officials from the Finnish embassy in Paris. Rogers was hauled into a French court where he was informed that the boys must be returned to Finland under a Schengen order filed in Helsinki.

The judge in the French court was sympathetic to Rogers' plight, despite being unable to rescind the order returning the boys to Finland. He determined that there were errors in the Interpol kidnapping warrant that did not require him to turn Rogers over to Finnish authorities, and strongly advised him to leave France immediately.

Following the whole alleged "kidnapping" scenario, the Finnish attorney hired by Rogers appealed the custody claim of his ex-wife to the Supreme Court of Finland, and a funny thing happened. The court sided with the father, ruling that the custody granted him by the Family Court in Greenville County was valid. Although his Finnish ex-wife had the advantage of having the case heard in her own back yard, it appeared the rule of law would prevail.

When Rogers returned to Finland in August, 2004, to pick up his sons, however, he discovered that things were not quite that simple. Apparently, there is a provision in Finnish law that allows social workers to intercede in custody cases even after the courts have ruled. Rogers says another reason the bureaucracy was not disposed to help him was because his ex-wife's mother was a former social worker who retained extensive contacts within the very agency that was supposed to return her grandchildren to their American father.

When he finally saw his boys again, Rogers says they were willing, even eager to return to the Unites States with him. But in a scene that would fit neatly into a Kafka novel, the social workers decided the boys were so upset on the day they were to be turned over to their father that they let their mother take them from the building while Rogers waited in another room. A promise that they would return in several days proved false as well.

Despite favorable rulings from the Finnish courts, this father from America was still being frustrated by the bureaucracy at every turn. Rogers couldn't help but wonder what role Outi's family ties were playing. In addition to his ex-mother-in-law's connections with the social workers, his ex-wife's uncle is Markku Koski, the vice-speaker of the Parliament widely touted as a potential presidential candidate in upcoming elections.

Since his near-miss at getting the boys back the day they were hustled out the back door of the social workers office, John Rogers has had no contact with Jake or Alex. They are believed to be in hiding with their mother and her American boyfriend, fugitives from Finnish justice. But how diligently they are being sought remains an open question.

Outi had previously attempted to put political pressure on the government by organizing small demonstrations outside the Supreme Court designed to paint the boys as victims of their American father. Although the tabloid press in Finland paid some attention to the protests, the court followed the law, which was clear.

Rogers continues his efforts to return his boys to their friends and family in Mauldin. The anguish of this father who has played by the rules is palpable, as is his love for his sons. If international agreements are worth the paper on which they're printed, Jake and Alex will be back in school here before too long. While that justice may be delayed, John Rogers prays it won't be denied.

http://www.metrobeat.net/gbase/Expedite/Content?oid=oid:2964