A family’s four-year European legal challenge ends
17 December 2020
The Christian Legal Centre’s Roger Kiska comments on the latest judgment in the ECHR case of the Bodnariu family, who are challenging Norwegian child services for wrongly taking their children away.
According to Statistics Norway, 54, 592 children received care measures from child welfare services in Norway in 2019 alone. That represents nearly 3% of the children in Norway. Nearly 20% of those involved Norwegian-born children to immigrant parents. These statistics represent real families and real-life trauma for everyone involved.
In the fall of 2015, the five children of Ruth and Marius Bodnariu became part of these statistics when they were separated from their parents, their friends and school, and from each other into 3 different households, hours apart from each other. In fact, in many ways, the Bodnarius have become the very symbol of Norway’s staggering child welfare statistics.
Christian Concern
17 December 2020 Issued by: Christian Legal Centre
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) today dismissed a nearly four-year long challenge of Norway’s child services agency for having taken a Christian family’s five children, including a three-month old baby, into care without fully investigating their concerns about abuse in the family.
The Bodnariu family brought a case against the Norwegian government arguing that the basis of the removal of the children was related to the lead social care worker’s prejudices against the family’s Pentecostal faith and for failing to properly investigate the matter before taking steps to separate the family.