Enforced Disappearance in Norway?

 

Do Norwegian authorities violate the fundamental International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance?

 

 

One morning, the doorbell rings. You put down the coffee cup and open the front-door, smiling, to welcome  an unexpected guest,  to a warm home that smells like morning coffee, freshly squeezed orange juice and toast.

Inn storms six armed policemen, accompanied by two  women in the background. Four of the men hold you in a tight grip. You feel a sharp pain in your shoulder as it dislocates.  Your pajamas shirt rips. It all feels like a dream, just unreal.
Two policemen and the ladies run into your daughters bedroom, and drags the seven year old girl out of her princess bedding. She screams in agony as she is pulled along the ground and into a waiting car. Her cheek is bleeding, and the last you hear of her, is «Help me, help me!»

The ladies laugh as she is transported to a hidden address to strangers.

The screams you’ll never forget. They wake you up at night, they haunt you every second of the day, the rest of your life.

The Norwegian social services have claimed yet another family, as victims of their daily schedule.

At the same time a new mother and father sit on the hospital bed, staring into the air. They are in shock and do not understand what has happened.
Two ladies with clenched, expressionless faces, along with four armed policemen suddenly appeared at the hospital, and tore the neonate straight from the breast of the nursing mother, who had neither a history of substance abuse or severe psychiatric disorders. Neither had there been any incidences of violence in the tranquil home of the expecting couple.
The last the parents see of their baby-boy, is a glimpse of a bare head and, a grin on the formerly emotionless faces of the social workers, as they lead the child away from his parents to a secret location.

 

Suddenly the couple realizes why the nurses seemed to behave so peculiarly. They were evasive , and avoided answering questions that the parents asked. They just hurried out of the room as soon as they saw that the child was doing fine.

The hospital staff were involved in the planning of the forceful removal of the new-born baby boy, who was placed at a secret address at an employee of the social services, who also happened to be a good friend of the ladies involved in the removal of the child. The person has tripled her income after she began to accept forcefully removed children in home.
What the parents don’t realize, sitting on the hospital bed, shocked, staring into the air, heart pounding and chest aching after their first born baby, is the fact that what they were exposed to, is occurring to such an extent in Norway, that hospitals have  developed a policy on how to prepare a forceful child removal, without making the parents suspicious.

 

Link to such guidelines (Norwegian page),
 

 

Spania Posten wrote in 2011-03-15 to Norwegians living in Spain, about the investigation of the Spanish practice of removing children from political dissidents directly from birth.

These children were forcibly adopted well into the eighties, to families supporting the state policy, as the parents were told that their children were stillborn or died shortly after birth. Doctors, midwives, officials and nurses were paid for these kidnappings, today referred to as The Lost Children of Francoism.

The search for victims of these state-kidnappings, is ongoing to this day. The solicitor Baltasar Garzón urged the abductions to be treated as crimes against humanity, as did the the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

 

According to Wikipedia, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, requested in February 2012, authorities of Spain to comply with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and bring justice to the case of The Lost Children of Francoism, and reminded the authorities of the country that crimes against humanity do not have  a statute of limitation.

A Spanish blog site that discusses these processes bearing an uncanny resemblance to the Norwegian state practice today, gives us a list of violations of international conventions which Spain has pledged to abide, like Norway.
One of the conventions that are mentioned, as of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, is The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

 

You can read the entire convention

 

Another convention claimed that Spain has been guilty of breaking, is the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance.

 

The similarities between the state abductions that occurred from the forties to the eighties in Francoist Spain, are striking with the practice of government abductions happening in Norway, today.

 

Is Norway violating such a basic convention?

 

Excerpt from the convention:

 

Article 1
1. No one shall be subjected to enforced disappearance.

2. No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification for enforced disappearance.

 

Article 2
For the purposes of this Convention, «enforced disappearance» is considered to be the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty by agents of the State or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorization, support or acquiescence of the State, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law.

           you can read the Convention in it’s entirety.
 

 

As Norway has not ratified the convention, hence denying residents to report to the Commitee on Enforced Disapearance, the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances can be contected to report a case of enforced disappearance. By undersigning the convention, Norway is still obligated not to commit such serious crimes as desribed as enforced disappearance.

 

A form on the right hand side of the home-page of the Working Group should be used for proper reprting a disappeared  person (Form to submit a communication on a victim of an enforced disappearance).

 

 

 

Contact:

 

Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances

c/o OHCHR-UNOG

CH-1211 Geneva 10

Switzerland
Telephone: (41-22) 917 90 00 Fax: (+41-22) 917 90 06
E-mail: wgeid@ohchr.org