Hague Mothers’ Project Team
Some of the women who are working with us have been involved for many years in the fight for justice, some are new to the campaign. Some have joined the project because of their personal experiences, others through knowing or hearing about mothers whose lives have been torn apart by the Convention.
Heartfelt thanks to all of you – including those who have to remain anonymous for reasons of personal safety.
*Our movement for justice is growing… we’ll update this page on a regular basis.
Strategy Group
Our stellar International Strategy Group will work to increase our influence and effectiveness on a global stage. They are:
Adrienne Barnett (UK)
Adrienne is a Reader in Law at Brunel University London. She specialised for 25 years in Family Law, primarily representing parents and children in serious care cases and in private law cases involving allegations of domestic abuse. She is a member of the Advisory Group of Rights of Women and of Women’s Aid’s Expert Advisory Group to the Child First campaign. Adrienne was commissioned by the Ministry of Justice to undertake a literature review to support their inquiry into risks of harm and the family courts (published June 2020). She featured as an expert in the 2021 Channel 4 Dispatches Programme ‘Torn Apart – Family Courts Uncovered’ and was commissioned to prepare the programme’s survey report. She is a collaborator in a Canadian funded international research project on domestic abuse and parental alienation allegations in the family courts.
Merle Weiner (US)
Merle is the Philip H. Knight Professor and the founder of the Domestic Violence Clinic at the University of Oregon School of Law, of which she was the faculty director for twenty years. She is an expert in domestic abuse law, family law, international and comparative family law, family law policy and the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. She co-wrote the first US casebook on international and comparative family law, entitled ‘Family Law in the World Community’, which is now in its third edition. Her latest article, ‘You Can and You Should’, was written to help trial courts apply the Hague Abduction Convention justly when the respondent is a domestic violence survivor.
Nicole Fidler (US)
Nicole Fidler is the Director of the Pro Bono Project at Sanctuary for Families, a New York-based non-profit organization dedicated to serving survivors of domestic violence, sex trafficking, and other forms of gender-based violence. Nicole represents survivors seeking help with orders of protection, child custody, child support, and Hague Child Abduction cases. Nicole participated in the creation of the New York Hague Child Abduction Bench Guide for Federal and State Judges and has published articles on trauma-informed lawyering and litigating order of protection cases. Nicole is co-chair of the New York City Bar Association’s Pro Bono & Legal Services Committee and a member of the Public Interest Pro Bono Association. She regularly trains on issues related to domestic violence and trauma.
Sudha Shetty (US)
Sudha is the founder and director of The Hague Domestic Violence Project at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on the intersection of international child abduction and battered mothers. She has been working with judges, lawyers and academics across the US to create judicial benchguides and training, to protect women and their children from the unintended consequences of The Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of Child Abduction.
Sudha is a founding member and chair of Chaya, a grass-roots South Asian domestic violence prevention program in Seattle. She is the recipient the Father Drinan Award for forwarding the ethic of pro bono and public service in law schools through personal service, program design and management.
Miranda Kaye (AUS)
Miranda is an academic at UTS law school in Sydney. She teaches and researches family law. Her research is interdisciplinary, drawing on socio-legal research methods to investigate real world impacts of family law principles and procedures. Miranda uses qualitative research methods to make recommendations for improved access to justice. For example, with UTS colleagues, Miranda recently completed a study of the effects of self-representation in the Family Law Court in matters involving allegations of family violence. Funded by the Australian National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety (ANROWS) the research made a series of recommendations to improve the experiences and safety of self-represented litigants in such proceedings. Miranda researched the Hague Convention and its impact on victims of domestic violence in the late 1990s and has just revisited the issue. She is rather depressed to find that nothing has changed during that time.
Chris McCurley (UK)
Cris is a Solicitor Advocate at Ben Hoare Bell LLP, and a Resolution-accredited specialist in International child abduction, domestic violence work and cases involving forced marriage and honour-based violence. She is a member of various Ministry of Justice working groups on domestic abuse and family law, focusing on legal aid and on governmental responses to the needs of domestic violence victims – both women and children. She is a regular contributor to legal books and journals and is a UN CEDAW shadow report writer. Cris has given evidence at the last two CEDAW enquiries into the Government’s compliance with the Convention, and has given evidence to the House of Lords constitutional committee, and to various APPGs on domestic abuse and on legal aid.
Three country-based Steering Groups will focus on ending Hague injustices in their jurisdictions, and will share their experience and expertise with each other to maximise our collective impact.
Australia & New Zealand Steering Group
Miranda Kaye
See International Strategy Group.
Gina Hope Masterton
Gina is a feminist and an activist for women’s human rights. A former solicitor and barrister (Queensland, Australia), she is currently an Indigenous Post-Doctoral Researcher with the Queensland University of Technology Centre for Justice in Australia. Her research includes investigating how domestic and family violence affects women and children, specifically Indigenous women. Gina’s PhD looked at how The Hague Child Abduction Convention affects abused women and children.
Yvette Cehtel
Yvette is the CEO of Women’s Legal Service Tasmania, a specialist service for women with a focus on family violence, with 22 years post admission experience predominately in the legal assistance sector in Tasmania. Yvette has a Masters of Law in human rights and has dedicated her career to addressing structural inequalities. Yvette is also the Women’s Legal Service Australia representative on the National Women’s Safety Alliance.
Lydia Rose
Lydia is a Hague mother and her case was heard in the New Zealand Court of Appeal, which she won, setting a new precedent for Hague mothers escaping domestic violence in New Zealand. Prior to her case, domestic violence was not considered in Hague cases by the New Zealand Courts. Lydia is a social worker with Wellington Rape Crisis and works with individuals who are going through the legal process of navigating the justice system. As part of her role, Lydia provides advocacy and support for individuals and their families, to ensure their voices are heard during the entire legal process. She also volunteers her time to support Hague mothers when they arrive in New Zealand, and is in the process of founding a charity organisation for this purpose with another Hague convention survivor.
United Kingdom Steering Group
Adrienne Barnett, chair
See International Strategy Group.
Cris McCurley
See International Strategy Group.
Sonja Ayeb Karlsson
Sonja lectures at University College London. Her current research interests focus on psychologically and legally ‘trapped’ populations; gender-based violence and policy protection (or lack of protection); the mental health impacts of humanitarian disasters or specific legal systems such as the family courts, or policy tools (e.g. Human Rights Act, the Istanbul Convention, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and Family Law); and non-economic losses and damages in the context of the UNFCCC climate negotiations. She also leads the mental health work of the Lancet Countdown.
Ruth Lamont
Ruth is a Senior Lecturer in Family & Child Law at the University of Manchester. Her PhD examined EU law relating to international child abduction and she has researched extensively into the impact of European and international law on the regulation of cross-border family life. She worked with the Office of the Victims’ Commissioner on a review of the constitutional powers of the Commissioner to contribute to the development of legislation on the interests of victims.
Ruth is a trustee for Global ARRK and an editor for the Child and Family Law Quarterly and Family Law, OUP.
Kim Fawcett
Kim is a Teaching Fellow in Criminal Law at Durham University and co-director of the Durham Gender and Law Research Centre. She gained a first-class degree in Law from Teesside University. Her research interests include the Hague Abduction Convention and its impact on mothers’ fleeing domestic violence and she is currently waiting to be examined for her PhD: ‘When women abduct: do we need a defence for women who abduct their children internationally in order to flee domestic abuse?’ A Hague mother herself, Kim was a trustee and a Parent Support Volunteer at GlobalARRK, assisting victims of the Hague, most of whom were also domestic violence survivors. She has also worked as a Family Support Worker in Low Newton Women and Young Offenders Prison.
United States & Canada Steering Group (more to come!)
Sudha Shetty
See International Strategy Group.
Nicole Fidler
See International Strategy Group.
Ruth Dineen is co-ordinating the project with invaluable help from FiLiA volunteers.
Ruth Dineen
Ruth is a FiLiA volunteer and the co-ordinator of the Hague Mothers project. She is also one of the co-founders of Merched Cymru, a grassroots group of women from across Wales working to protect and promote the rights of women and girls.
Ruth also co-founded the Co-production Network for Wales, based on Edgar Kahn’s principles of collectivism and social justice, and is a co-production trainer and facilitator. She was previously Head of Department of Creative Communications at Cardiff Metropolitan University.
Michelle Kerwin
Michelle has been a FiLiA volunteer since 2019, providing admin assistance and podcast editing, as well as helping with the organisation of the annual FiLiA Conference. Michelle will be supporting the Hague Mother’s project on the equivalent of one day per week. She is also a founding member of Womanchester Feminist Collective.
Team Members
And we have a growing number of team members who are supporting us in a host of ways; on our country-based legal teams, heading up research, working with us to create resources to help women through the court process, extending our understanding of the impact of domestic violence, running undergraduate programmes on the HAC, creating trauma-informed training programmes for our story archive interviewers, producing information for Hague mothers and those at risk of becoming Hague mothers, lobbying politicians, raising awareness, and generally being wonderful.
They are listed by country.
Australia & New Zealand
United Kingdom
United States, Canada & Mexico
Rest of the World (more to come!)