le combat d’un père pour retrouver sa fille enlevée par son ex-femme
The 6-year-old girl has been living in Egypt with her mother since last July despite a ban on leaving the country. The father is fighting for the Egyptian authorities to apply the arrest warrant issued against his ex-wife.
He placed a bracelet made with candy under Shaya’s pillow, “so she could find it when she got home.” Saminou Nioka is counting the days. In this case, 158 without seeing his daughter. More than five months spent fighting for justice to be applied. He did go to Egypt last September to try to bring his daughter back, in vain. Today the Ministry of Foreign Affairs assures him that the file is taken seriously. However, the Bordelais spent Christmas without his daughter. The situation seems to have stalled.
On July 17, the father said he had dropped off his daughter “so that her mother could exercise her visitation and accommodation rights for two weeks”. “ Together They had to spend two weeks of vacation », He explains calmly. ” On July 31, I went to the “meeting point” to pick up my daughter. On my arrival, the agents will inform me, her mother called about twenty minutes before to say that she will not bring Shaya back and that she had made the decision to leave with her. She feels that by doing this she is fixing an injustice “. This injustice is that of having lost custody of his daughter.
Since 2017, it is Saminou Nioka who has sole custody of the car. “ Not only was there no parental authorization (…), but judicially, she had a ban on leaving the country since 2017 and which has never been called into question. », Explains Me Caroline Bris. “ There were 5 decisions of the family court judge. Each time she asked for the lifting of this ban on leaving the country and the judges have always confirmed with great motivation (…) the maintenance of this decision “.
An examining magistrate issued an arrest warrant for Shaya’s mother. “Normally, now, it is up to the Egyptian authorities to execute this arrest warrant,” explains the lawyer. “The reasonable application period has been largely exceeded since it has been more than 5 months”.
After Egypt is a country known to be a country that does not easily fulfill this kind of request.
Egypt is not among the 98 countries that have had the Hague Convention on International Child Abductions (see the map below). ” So this is our main problem », Concedes Saminou Nioka’s lawyer. This convention “has the clearly defined objective of promoting relations of judicial cooperation between the Contracting States to facilitate the recognition and enforcement of foreign decisions in matters of custody and visiting rights”, explains the Ministry of Justice.
But one point could play in Saminou Nioka’s favor. Shaya’s mother is not of Egyptian nationality but French. ” It happens very often in international parental abductions that the abducting parent goes to their country of origin. », Recalls the lawyer. “ In these cases, there is indeed a protection of the national by his country therefore of the parent who comes from that country. So this is explained. But there, we actually have no explanation and for two reasons: this child is French without dual nationality, both parents are French without dual nationality, and Madame works in an institution which is subsidized by France. So we do not understand this non-execution of the arrest warrant “. According to Saminou Nioka, Shaya’s mother is a teacher in a high school of the French secular mission in Cairo.
Saminou Nioka, however, had hope. ” Around September 14, I received an email from the French consul in Cairo, telling me that the Egyptian authorities were preparing to execute the arrest warrant. », He says. ” So to prevent my daughter from being entrusted to Egyptian social services, I had to come to Egypt to be able to pick her up. What I did immediately “. It will arrive on September 16 on site.
“For three weeks nothing happens, I see the consul three times, and I end up making the decision to come back seeing that nothing is done.”
A difficult decision to make, “knowing that I am about twenty minutes from my daughter’s home but that the consulate strongly advises me not to go there, the same for her school”. Because I am told that at any time an intervention is to come and that the fact of going there could compromise this intervention “. He therefore left without having seen his daughter, but since then they have been talking to each other on the phone regularly.
Saminou Nioka never managed to come into direct contact with the Egyptian authorities. He wrote several times to different English ministries but reportedly had “few responses”. “ At the beginning of November, the presidential cabinet replied to me that it was asking the foreign ministry for a careful examination of my situation, it was November 3“Shaya’s father says.”After that I got nothing. No return from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs “.
This is how I came in mid-December to get my story out in the press to finally get answers.
“And it is clear that this has started a certain form of communication with the ministries”, concludes Saminou Nioka. “Four days after the publication of the articles, the foreign ministry contacted me “. However, his situation has not changed.
His lawyer says he has exhausted all possible legal procedures. “ If there is no diplomatic support, ”she said,“ I think it will be very difficult to get Shaya back quickly. I say this very sincerely. Without the intervention of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in a very firm manner, compliance with French judicial but also civil and family decisions will be very difficult. “.
In the meantime, Saminou Nioka has an appointment with yet another legal deadline. Shaya’s mother would never have paid the child support she owes to her ex-husband. This had earned him a sentence of four months in prison, two of which were closed. She appealed. On January 11, the hearing will therefore take place before the Bordeaux Court of Appeal.