Polish courts have continued their strong defense of families after deciding to return parental rights of five Chechen children back to their mother after she fled to Poland from Denmark.
The Chechen family lived and worked in Denmark for several years where they earned their refugee status, with Zalina Adzjeva and her husband Artur Dombaev raising five children in the Scandinavian country. In 2017, when a conflict arose between the couple, the mother applied for a divorce, prompting the interest of Danish social services in the family.
In July 2019, Danish authorities from the administrative organization for child and youth issues (the Borne-Ungeforvaltningen) decided to split the five children apart and send them to three different foster families. The move occurred without stripping the parents of their parental authority
The parents could not accept the decision and decided to leave Denmark. The mother wanted to return to Chechnya through Poland, explained Babken Khanzadyan, the family’s lawyer who represented their case.
Danish authorities inserted the children in the Schengen Information System as lost persons, which led to the mother and her children being stopped on the Polish-Belarusian border near Terespol in eastern Poland.
After a court decision, the children were temporarily transferred to a foster family in Terespol.
The lawyer representing the family appealed the verdict and requested the Polish state give back full parental authority to the mother.
This week, the district court in Biała Podlaska in eastern Poland decided that the children will remain under the care of their parents.
“Full parental authority was restored. Once again, a Polish court stood in defense of a family and its basic rights by keeping them together,” Khanzadyan emphasized.
This is not the first such case in recent years. In April 2019, Russian Denis Lisov’s three daughters were taken away from him by Swedish social services and given to a Muslim foster family.
Lisov had escaped Sweden and Stockholm after authorities released a European arrest warrant for Lisov, claiming that he had kidnapped his daughters.
A Polish court decided not to turn the man over to Sweden and declared that the daughters should remain with him.
