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Over the past six and a half years, Tom Sylvester has come to regret that he rejected his older brother's advice. On October 30, 1995, Sylvester's wife abducted their baby daughter Carina to Austria. "My brother Paul told me to 'go get her,'" Sylvester explains. Instead, Sylvester put his trust in international law, and within hours of the abduction filed an application under the Hague Convention. Today, despite an order from Austria's highest court that Carina be reunited with her father in the U.S., Sylvester's only child remains in Austria -- where her father is only able to visit her at the whim of his former wife.

The Hague Convention obliges signatory countries to ensure that children in dispute are returned to the country of their "habitual residence" for a custody determination. But in practice, this international treaty cruelly punishes American parents and rewards foreign abductors. The U.S. returns virtually all children to their foreign habitual residence so quickly that their little heads spin, but American children are returned to the U.S. in fewer than 20 percent of the thousand cases a year reported to the State Department.

In the 1991 movie Not Without My Daughter, Hollywood told the dramatic story of Betty Mahmoody's flight with her child from an abusive husband in Iran. Since then, Americans have come to appreciate the hopeless situation that American mothers face when Middle Eastern fathers abduct children to countries where Islamic law enshrines the father's rights as absolute. While Mahmoody got her daughter back, hundreds of American children remain trapped in the Middle East. Pat Roush's two daughters have been condemned to what she calls the "medieval madness" of Saudi Arabia since their father abducted them from the suburbs of Chicago 16 years ago. Tom Sylvester knows what he would have done in that case: Because Saudi Arabia, like all other Islamic countries, is not a party to the Hague Convention, he would have taken his brother's advice.

"I was deceived," Sylvester explains. "I trusted in the idea that Austria was a civilized country that would live up to its obligations." From the moment he realized that his Austrian wife had taken a credit- card cash advance of $5,000 and charged two plane tickets to Europe, Sylvester did everything "right" under the Hague Convention. Austria, along with about 50 other countries, is a party to the convention. But Austria, like most European countries, has no effective enforcement mechanism for this kind of infraction -- so the abducting parent is perfectly free to ignore custody, visitation, and access orders. Two years ago, the U.S. Congress unanimously passed a resolution estimating that over 10,000 American children were being wrongfully kept in foreign countries -- and fingering Austria, Germany, and Sweden as among those who "consistently violate" the convention.

Within four months of Carina's abduction, Sylvester had won a "valid and final" order from the Austrian supreme court mandating the child's return to the U.S. Accompanied by local police and court officials, Sylvester went to his former wife's home in Graz to enforce the return order -- only to be told by the ex-wife that Carina was "in the mountains" with her grandmother. And that was that. "I spent over $200,000 for a worthless piece of paper," Sylvester says. "I didn't want a court order, I wanted my daughter."

A year later, following the ex-wife's petition to "reopen" the Hague Convention case -- on the grounds that the child had by then been in Austria for some time -- a trial court formally decided that the return order wouldn't be enforced. In congressional testimony, Sylvester railed against the circular nightmare he was caught in: "The child was not returned because the order was not enforced, now the order will not be enforced because the child was not returned."

Sylvester points out that within a year of Carina's abduction, four children were returned to Austria under U.S. court orders. In accordance with our obligations under the Hague Convention, the federal government contracts with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to help foreign parents locate and win the return of their children. But while U.S. taxpayers foot the bill to help foreign parents, American parents are largely on their own when a European parent snatches their children. And the State Department itself is an obstacle. In testimony before the House International Relations Committee, one American father criticized the "dereliction of duty" and "incompetence, inexperience, and mismanagement" on the part of government officials charged with assisting American parents. He told the committee that when he pressed his case, State Department legal adviser Catherine Brown baldly told him: "I don't work for the American people, I work for the secretary of state."

And this particular father's opinion might fairly be viewed as that of an expert. Tom Johnson is a Harvard-educated State Department human- rights lawyer whose daughter Amanda, a U.S. citizen and resident from her birth in 1987, has been wrongly retained by his Swedish diplomat ex-wife since 1995. Under a mutual agreement following their divorce, custody had been shared between Amanda's father in Virginia and her Swedish mother. Johnson sought relief under the Hague Convention. Four Swedish courts either ordered his daughter's return, or held that Sweden had no jurisdiction. The Hague process lasted 17 months, instead of the six-week time frame mandated by the convention. After endless delays and litigation in eight separate proceedings in six courts -- a process that cost Johnson, too, over $200,000 -- a final Swedish court reversed all previous rulings and refused to return the child. The Swedish government paid all the abductor's legal expenses; Johnson believes the drawn-out litigation was a bad-faith effort on the part of Sweden to exhaust the financial resources of the American parent.

Since 1995, Amanda's father has seen her on only a handful of occasions for supervised visits -- always subject to the whim of the mother, because his visitation and access rights are unenforceable under Sweden's civil-justice system. Johnson points out that these Hague Convention cases are not merely the "private child-custody disputes" that the State Department prefers to label them: They are treaty violations in which the legal and social-welfare agencies of foreign governments are actively aiding and abetting the commission of federal and state felonies against American parents and their children.

In his testimony, Johnson explained that the State Department has a hopeless conflict of interest: The diplomats have determined that embarrassing violations of the Hague Convention must not be allowed to interfere with bilateral relationships with non-compliant countries. He believes, therefore, that responsibility for resolving these cases should rest elsewhere. He proposes that the NCMEC take over the job of assisting American parents, by keeping case files and reporting to Congress on both foreign-government and State and Justice Department conduct. If state-court judges were informed of the Europeans' inability to enforce the rights of non-custodial parents, they might reconsider their policy of automatically returning children to Europe: They would be on notice that they were effectively severing the American parent's relationship with the child. The Hague Convention provides a narrow exception that precludes returning a child if there is a "grave risk of harm" to the child; being denied the involvement of a committed parent should certainly fit the definition of "grave risk," and thus prevent the child's return until the other country was able to enforce visitation and access orders.

The U.S. should take other steps as well. We should prevent foreign citizens in countries that don't comply with their treaty obligations from enjoying the convention's protections, while American parents are unable to enforce their own rights. The federal government should stop negotiating child-support agreements with countries that are in violation of the convention, and should refuse to extradite Americans accused of abduction to countries that refuse to extradite their own citizens for the same offense. In its annual Human Rights Report, the State Department might express the same concern for the rights of American parents and children that it does for Scientologists in Germany.