{{A 10-year-old girl Sara ripped apart her American passport outside the U.S. Consulate in St. Petersburg.}}
With photo cameras snapping and television cameras rolling, Sara defiantly said she had no intention of living in the U.S.
Standing nearby, her mother, Russian emigre and Harvard graduate Marianne Grin, voiced support for legislation banning Americans from adopting Russian children — the reason for the rally in late December.
“The way that America betrayed us has led us to despair,” Grin said by phone Thursday, explaining her daughter’s actions.
State media lapped up the scene of a child rejecting her father’s U.S. heritage in favor of her mother’s Russian roots.
The image of Sara tearing up her passport — albeit it was expired — appeared on television and in newspapers and blogs as the country debated the Jan. 1 ban on U.S. child adoptions.
Sara’s theatrical gesture, however, casts the spotlight on a less visible sore point in U.S.-Russian relations where children are also suffering: child custody disputes.
A legal battle between Grin and Michael McIlwrath, a U.S. lawyer based in Italy, over Sara and her three siblings is indicative of the fraught nature of international custody disputes.
But what makes this case more distressing are fears that the father is being punished because of a recent upswing in anti-American sentiment in Russia, said Alexander Khazov, McIlwrath’s St. Petersburg-based lawyer.
After the couple divorced, an Italian court initially awarded custody to Grin in 2009.
But another court in Florence, where three of the children were born and raised, ordered psychological tests on all family members and ruled in December 2010 that the children should move in with their father.
That arrangement remained in place until August 2011, when Grin took the children from Florence to St. Petersburg, unbeknown to her former husband.
She has not returned to Italy since and has lodged appeals with Russian courts to overturn earlier verdicts placing the children, now aged 6 to 15, with their father, to deprive him of his parental rights and to secure alimony payments.
On Jan. 25, about a month after Sara defaced her passport, the St. Petersburg City Court sided with Grin, overruling Florentine court decisions and saying that Russia doesn’t extradite its citizens.
The ruling came despite bilateral children’s rights agreements that oblige Russia and Italy to recognize analogous verdicts passed in either country.
In comments to journalists before and after the hearing, Grin described herself as a put-upon Russian mother forced to flee an abusive American husband.
Her ex-husband’s lawyer noted, however, that she only renewed her Russian citizenship in 2007, after letting her Soviet-era passport expire, and has offered no evidence that McIlwrath mistreated their children.
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