Posted by Colin Randall at 17 Aug 06 17:26
Tags: Crime, Family, Religion, Relationships, Nathalie Gettliffe
Outside France or Canada, few but net-surfing news junkies will have heard of Nathalie Gettliffe, a 35-year-old languages lecturer from Lyons at the centre of a bitter tug-of-love battle.
Should Nathalie Gettliffe be behind bars?
It is a sad but intriguing case involving a hopelessly torn family and allegations of kidnapping and religious extremism. Tomorrow, Nathalie, heavily pregnant with her fourth child, will learn whether she is to give birth as a prisoner or a free woman.
It is easier to explain if we start in less troubled times. At the end of the 1980s, Nathalie, still a teenager, met and married Scott Grant, a Canadian a few years older than her. They had a boy and a girl now aged 12 and 11.
Relations between the couple deteriorated. According to Nathalie (I use Christian names for convenience), the principal cause was her husband’s growing attachment to the Vancouver Church of Christ, which is linked to the US-based International Church of Christ (ICC).
The ICC has attracted fierce criticism over the years and is considered a sect in France, but not in Canada. Scott insists that he attends an ordinary place of worship that “acts like a Protestant church.”
“We don’t put our hands up and talk in tongues and stuff like that, he told the Vancouver Sun newspaper.
Sitting in Paris, I clearly cannot say what Scott's "attachment" involved or whether it is reasonable to criticise him or his church.
Nathalie Gettliffe
In any event, Nathalie decided to seek a divorce. According to Francis Gruzelle, her present French partner and the father of both her third child and the unborn baby, life had become impossible for her.
She was not permitted to leave British Columbia with the children without the court's blessing. She claims, however, to have been troubled by the effect Scott had on their children when he saw them after their separation.
Nathalie resolved to take the children back to France. Scott resisted, and the court supported him. She went anyway, in September 2001, making her liable to abduction charges.
Custody was granted to Scott, a ruling upheld in France, where the courts felt bound by the Hague Convention on Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction.
Francis, supported by a highly vocal campaign in France, says this makes a mockery of justice because it ignores the details of the dispute, the children's views and what drove Nathalie to act as she did.
For nearly five years, the children continued to live in France. As the arm of Canadian law stretched out to reclaim them for Scott, the Gettliffe clan did its best to keep them out of its reach.
In April this year, already four months into her pregnancy, Nathalie did something that, for a woman wanted on kidnapping charges, seemed utterly stupid. She flew to Vancouver, and was promptly arrested and thrown into jail.
Most news reports I have seen say the visit concerned her PhD thesis at the University of British Columbia. Francis tells me the main purpose was to sign, with Scott, an interim agreement negotiated over the preceding months on the future care of their children.
She therefore believed, says Francis, that the matter was now being treated as a family case, not a criminal one.
Nathalie has remained in jail since. Tomorrow’s bail application is not her first and it would be generous to describe Canadian justice as seeming in any hurry to deal with it.
Her earliest bid to be freed pending trial was not decided until May, and was rejected on the grounds that she might abscond. The judge noted that the children were still in France and said she seemed to think she was entitled to defy court orders with which she disagreed.
Nathalie says the implication of this, and previous hints from Canadian officials, was that she might be freed if the children were voluntarily returned to Canada. Just like "an exchange of hostages", one supporter told me.
The latest bail attempt has been adjourned three times, to the exasperation of her Canadian lawyer and French supporters.
Whatever other considerations arise, it does appear that “doing a runner” is beyond a woman who has been confined to bed for long periods, has received visitors in a wheelchair and is likely, according to Francis, to go into labour within days.
Meanwhile, the two children are with Scott, having been picked up by gendarmes from a relative’s home in the French Alps in July and flown back to Canada.
Accounts of what they make of it differ. The Gettliffe camp says that on the two occasions she has been allowed to see them in jail, they cried their eyes out and said they would rather be dead than separated from her.
Scott told the Vancouver Sun, in a revealing interview published this week, that both children were pictures of happiness when they explored boxes of Christmas presents he had kept for them. He talked of them adjusting well to their new lives and said that it was now his duty to stop them coming to “hate their mom”.
There is a tendency, during highly publicised disputes between people of different nationalities, for the press of each country to adopt partisan positions.
Canadian reports tend to present Scott in a favourable light; the tone of some French coverage would make you think Canada was a corrupt tinpot state where human rights are routinely trounced.
I have tried to outline contentious events without judging the issues.
But I do have humanitarian misgivings about the treatment of Nathalie. It seems beyond belief that suitable arrangements, maybe involving French consular officials, could not have been found to avoid her spending a difficult pregnancy in jail.
I also think this tangled and heartbreaking affair should receive wider attention. It is not my job to choose between the respective parenting skills of Nathalie and Scott, or to decide on her guilt (however powerfully mitigated) or innocence.
If convicted, she theoretically faces up to 10 years. But this is British Columbia not Texas and surely no sane judge would contemplate a sentence of anything like that length, if indeed any custodial sentence at all would somehow make the world a better or safer place.
So we are left with Nathalie preparing as best she can for a trial in November and an aggrieved father trying to forge a loving relationship with the children they both brought into the world.
And Nathalie, who likens the difference between the two jails where she has been held to that between a zoo and a safari, is writing a book on the “Hell of Canadian Prisons”. Both she and Francis plan election battles - he against the French justice minister, she for the presidency.
I will note the outcome of the bail hearing as soon as I can, as a comment to this posting. Bearing in mind that this is a blog, not a news agency, anyone who cannot wait should search French internet news sources.
Footnote
* Late on Friday night (but daytime over there), a judge refused Nathalie's bid for bail. She will now give birth in custody unless an appeal succeeds. I will return to the subject soon.
Posted by Colin Randall at 17 Aug 06 17:26
Some of the Comments posted on the blog: (we have taken the liberty of deleting the ones donated by oxygen pirates.)
shane at 18 Aug 2006 12:24
Quelle honte!The whole situation seems to have been very dubiously dealt with by the French and Canadian authorities, with those poor children stuck in the middle and whisked away by a battalion of helicopters, armed guards, telesurveillance etc. And why not tanks and anti-aircraft weapons. They are obviously dangerous criminels...
I can understand why Nathalie wanted to protect her kids from such nefarious influences. Pity the French government didn't support their national citoyenne.
Sarah Hague at 18 Aug 2006 13:37
Gratuitous offense Mr. Randal, you could not let it go without getting a dig in about Texas, a state about which you are very probably ignorant, other then what you believe you know. Pity …
Sohail Kayani at 18 Aug 2006 16:17
Worse than a Brazilian TV Series 2
Could it be that there is petrol involved, or an oleoduque?
richard of orléans at 19 Aug 2006 07:31
amazingI see in today's Figaro that Nathalie will remain in prison. It astounds me that she risks 10 years for 'abducting' her children...probably if she had shot her ex, and pleaded guilty she would be out on bail and perhaps risk a couple of years of prison.I don't know who is the innocent party in this battle - what horrifies me is the effect on the two children being torn apart and probably brainwashed in the process...
Louise at 19 Aug 2006 07:39
No bail
Bail was refused (see footnote).
Colin Randall at 19 Aug 2006 09:14
Re: Gettliffe thesis
I have to believe Monsieur Gruzelle is being disingenuous, at the very least, when he claims Madame Gettliffe was travelling to Vancouver to sign a mediation agreement. Her imminent Ph.D. thesis defence date was posted on the University of British Columbia's website at the time she was arrested. Although it has since been removed from the website when she failed to appear at the examination due to her arrest, I saw the initial posting, as did many other people. That makes me wonder how much of what Monsieur Gruzelle claims to be the truth of this matter should be believed. There is a publication ban on information related to this case at the moment, and I suspect things will become clearer when the trial begins.
James Hamilton at 20 Aug 2006 14:48
illegal arrest(s) and detention...Arrest(s)and detention of Nathalie Gettliffe are so illegal that High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour asked her services in Geneva to react to the 15 pages memorandum I sent her, end of July.So Canadian government has now less than 3 months to answer questions from OHCHR, about many violations of Canadian laws, Chart of rights, International Pact, etc...There is some flavour of "Vancouvergate" behind this story...
Louis Ripault at 21 Aug 2006 06:49
Non coupable
Despite a suggestion from my former colleague Kim Fletcher (on the Guardian website) that I am too mild-mannered in my responses to belligerent readers, I find myself wondering why some people find it so hard to read. Anyone familiar with the English language would see that I have sided with Nathalie Gettliffe on the issue of bail, and on nothing else.
Colin Randall at 21 Aug 2006 11:27
International Church of ChristThe ICC is indeed a very controversial organisation, even in the United States. It has been banned from a large number of US College Campuses for its aggressive targetting of young students. Although religious "cult" is a term used in the United States, their activites are difficult to restrict (as in most democracies.) But it is not unreasonable to think that someone might be concerned at their impressionable children having contact with this organisation.
For a anti-ICC view readers might want to look at the web-site http://www.reveal.org/ which is run by former members.
More objective seem the decisions of Harvard, Georgia State University, Boston University, Tufts, Northeastern, Princeton, NYU and dozens of other universities to ban the organisation. This is a pretty big step for a US college, in what is a quite religous country, especially with an avowedly "Christian" group, and must be seen a raising many red flags.
I am a bit puzzzled by the reference to Texas -- the ICC is/was based in Boston, and its efforts at Texas colleges were very controversial in Texas.
MacK at 21 Aug 2006 12:10
Partner's with Dual Passports
There is an element of hypocrisy to UK coverage on this issue. After all, the wife of Christopher Meyer, Lady Catherine Meyer, famously spent years trying to get her children back from her ex-german husband who had abducted them to Germany, with the vocal support of the British press for their return under the Hague Convention.
You cannot pick and choose when to obey the convention, but many signatories appear to do so; France in this case appears to have been very dilatory in complying with its obligations -- On the other hand Canada seems to have downplayed concerns on religious freedom grounds, which illustrates one problem with the convention is that some countries will tend to ignore issues that other will regard as very important in issues of custody.
MacK at 21 Aug 2006 12:17
English may be my second language but, Colin Randall's mild-mannered protestation to the contrary, his retailing of this sad story does read as more sympathetic to Nathalie Gettliffe.
James Hamilton at 21 Aug 2006 13:44
lAW/JUSTICE.....or humanité & common sense .Who's right or wrong is not really the issue here. Of course I have my own opinion which I expressed and was 100% censored for - every word except the silly second word which was a puny joke.
The real issue is what is and is not legal. Law should = Justice, but of course none of us imagine this is so.
The Commission for Human Rights and Louise Arbour thereof have serious doubts...and so do I!
There's something smelly about the way things were done - even if you do not give your personal opinion.....and from a humaine point of view the conditions of Nathalie's detention seem somewhat rough.
No more to be said because of the terrible blue pencil (worse tha Damocles)!
Diane Rauscher-Kennedy at 21 Aug 2006 14:00
Dad vs Mum
Anyone one know why custody was granted to the dad in the first place? More stable job, etc?
If you read up on the cult, oops, I mean ICC, I think anyone outside would not want their kids to have anything to do with anyone inside it.
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