It has been almost half a year since Japan implemented the Hague Convention on International Child Abduction on April 1st of 2014. While implementing an international treaty as large and interconnected as the Hague Convention takes time and patience, enough time has passed to take a look at some of the emerging trends.
First, as of September 10th, there have been 68 cases received by Japan’s Central Authority under the Hague Convention. Of these cases, 15 have been requests for return of an abducted child and the remaining 53 have been requests for visitation under the Hague Convention. This large difference between the number of return requests and visitation requests is probably explained by the fact that return requests may not be made retroactively under the Hague Convention. However, requests for international visitation do not have any time constraints and can be made after-the-fact. Therefore, parents whose children were abducted prior to the April 1st implementation cannot file for a return request but they are able to request visitation under the Hague Convention. As time passes it is possible that the requests for visitation may fall in proportion to the requests for return of abducted children.
Second, the number of incoming requests (requests related to children abducted to Japan) has been much larger than the number of outgoing requests (requests related to children abducted from Japan to another country). As of September 10th, there were 50 incoming cases and 18 outgoing cases. As mentioned above, many of these cases are related to international visitation and this large disparity between incoming and outgoing cases may prove to be a temporary phenomenon. Only time will tell whether a degree of balance is established between incoming and outgoing cases.