Canada to review US extradition of protective mom (Ottawa, Canada)

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http://www.iol.co.za/news/world/canada-to-review-us-extradition-of-mom-1.1963881

Canada to review US extradition of mom
24 December 2015 at 12:31pm

By: AFP

Ottawa - Canada's attorney general said on Wednesday she would review the case of a Canadian woman facing extradition to the United States for allegedly stealing her children from their abusive American father.

“I have decided to reconsider this case,” Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould said in a statement, citing possible new facts in the years-long domestic dispute.

The woman, known only as “M” in court documents, has been fighting extradition since her arrest in 2010, and reportedly went on a brief hunger strike after Canada's top court ruled earlier this month that she could be sent to the US state of Georgia to face prosecution for interstate interference of a child custody order.

“M” and her former husband had three children before they divorced in 2001.

He was granted sole custody of the children while she received no visitation rights due to a substance abuse problem.

In October 2010 their father reported the children, who were 9, 10 and 14 years old at the time, missing.

Several weeks later, they turned up with their mother at a battered women's shelter in Quebec, and she was arrested.

But the children told Canadian child protection officials they ran away without their mother's knowledge and because of their father's abusive treatment and violence.

A Quebec judge would later grant the mother full custody of her children, which has not been challenged by their father.

The Supreme Court of Canada 4-3 split decision found extradition was justified in the case.

But dissenting justices wrote that the mother could not be found guilty on the abduction charge “since her intent was to protect the children from danger of imminent harm at the hands of their father.”