Finnish court rules against returning son to Russian mother
HELSINKI. June 15 (Interfax) - A court in the Finnish town of Vaasa ruled on Friday that Russian woman Rimma Salonen be denied the right of custody over her son Anton.
In addition to the previous ruling by a court in Tampere, which allowed the mother to have four-hour meetings with her son once a week, the Vaasa court also allowed her to have one five-hour meeting with the father's consent.
The court fears that Salonen is planning to kidnap her own child, her Finnish lawyer and human rights activist Johan Backman told Interfax. "The reason for that is her alleged appeal to the Russian people, in which she asked for help and pointed to the injustice toward Russian mothers in Finland," he said.
"According to the court, Salonen's ex-husband Paavo Salonen has nothing to be blamed for, that it was not him who organized the child's abduction from Russia, and as for the boy being smuggled in the car of a Finnish diplomat, the court seems to know nothing about it," Backman said. "According to the court, the entire blame lies with the mother who in March 2008 took her child to Russia on legal grounds," Backman said.
"The court did not recognize Anton's Russian citizenship and the fact that Russian is his mother tongue. The court cited the opinion of social workers who recommended that the mother be isolated from the child and opposed his affiliation with the Orthodox Christian faith," he added.
The fact that the court ruling was made public through mass media, without prior notification of the plaintiff and her lawyer, is a gross violation of the Finnish laws, Backman said.
Rimma Salonen's defense team is planning, within a statutory one-month period, to appeal the court ruling and demand that her parental rights be reinstated, the human rights activist said.
"The case of Rimma Salonen is already being examined at the European Court of Human Rights," Backman said.
It was reported that in 2008, five years after her divorce from Finnish citizen Paavo Salonen, Rimma Salonen took her son Anton, who was then 5 and has Finnish and Russian citizenships, to Balakhna, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia.
On April 12, 2009, several people, including Paavo, took the boy from Rimma. Aided by Simo Pietilainen, an employee of the Finnish Consulate General in St. Petersburg, Paavo Salonen smuggled his son to Finland in the trunk of a diplomatic car.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov expressed his protest against this turn of events in a telephone conversation with his Finnish counterpart on May 14, 2009, describing the smuggling of a child from Russia against his mother's will as "a gross violation of Russian law."
On October 13, 2009, a court in Tampere qualified Salonen's action as the kidnapping of her own son. The court imposed on her an 18-month suspended sentence and compelled her to pay 20,000 euro in damages to her son.
The child custody right was given to the woman's ex-husband. The Finnish court allowed the mother to see her son twice a month, accompanied by police officers and social workers. Later, though, the amount of damages was slashed to 10,000 euro.
In early 2011, Salonen demanded and was denied the reinstatement of her custodial right.
