Croatia: family court fiasco and corruption

Croatia is trafficking children, including mine

This is Neven Kucelj, a judge from Donja Stubica, a sleepy little town in Zagorje — a rural region of Croatia just a short drive from the capital which feels frozen in time.

Image: Judge Neven Kucelj, a judge at the Municipal Court in Zlatar. Source: Gloria magazine

I used to bump into Judge Kucelj when I started working in Donja Stubica for an American property investor. My family had bought a flat there, and we used to pass by each other when I was out walking my dog. A dapper, bohemian fellow, often dressed in a corduroy suit, perhaps with a paisley cravat, he would mumble hello into his beard and avoid eye contact. His parents live next door to a good friend of mine.

When I signed the contract for the flat, I never imagined that this risked trapping me in Donja Stubica for the rest of my working life. I never dreamed that one day a Croatian man I was yet to meet yet would try to defraud my family and I of our property and cash, and take away from me the two children I was destined to give life to.

I never dreamed of the role Judge Neven Kucelj would play in this.

In 2007 I entered a courtroom for the first time in my life. A local man brought a vexatious claim against my employer, and I was called as a witness. Judge Kucelj didn’t take long to see through the claimant and throw out the case, telling him that he was wasting everyone’s time.

I have spoken to several people in Donja Stubica who have told me that Judge Kucelj is “incorruptible”, “a great friend of mothers and children”. He came across as a decent man able to make sensible, humane decisions. One case was a judgment that favoured an adulterous mother over a hardworking, honest father. Others may interpret this differently, but I see this as a commitment to respecting the bond between mother and child, which is nowadays rare in family law.

Photo: the statue in the park in Donja Stubica’s town centre. Credit: Uzagorju.com

I met Judge Kucelj again in 2016. By that time I had got married, had twin boys following two miscarriages and moved with my young family to England after years of struggle to keep afloat in Croatia. Croatia is a beautiful country but corruption and nepotism have tanked the economy and led to almost half a million of its citizens leaving the country to start a new life elsewhere in the last 10 years.

Sadly, my then husband took the tragic step of taking the children to Croatia and refusing to return them in order to force me to move back there. His name is Zvonimir Marinovic, and he works in the Excise Department of the Croatian Ministry of Finance.

Child abduction case

On 14 November 2016 I sat in a courtroom presided over by Judge Neven Kucelj for the second time, this time a hearing in a parental child abduction case. We were sitting in the bizarrely huge new Municipal Court in Zlatar, an even more remote Zagorje backwater, where most of the court activities from Donja Stubica had been transferred. This is the first hint of how corruption infuses every part of life in Croatia. Donja Stubica is the historic capital of the region, and has relatively good transport links. Many staff found themselves unable to travel to work in Zlatar, and litigants, many of who are elderly and poor, struggle to get to court.

This is the Municipal Court in Zlatar. Zlatar has a rapidly declining population of 5574 souls.

Photo: The Municipal Court in Zlatar, Croatia

24 judges work there, and of these some work in outposts in other towns.

The regional State Prosecutor’s office is also based there but that’s just a handful of people. What on earth do they need all that space for?

In my days of working in real estate, locals would remark that the megalomaniac structure was the initiative of a corrupt local politician from the Croatian Democratic Union (in Croatian, HDZ). I am fairly sure that there will people happy to comment on this.

In Croatia, “HDZ” is popularly mispronounced “kradeze” – meaning “Croatian Union of Thieves”. The HDZ has ruled Croatia for most of the period since the war in the 1990s. I consider it a mafia party; it has led to Croatia being a lawless kleptocracy. The EU justice scoreboard and Rule of Law Country Reports show just how badly the justice system is performing in Croatia.

Razor-sharp perception

Back to the child abduction hearing. During that hearing, there was one moment I will never forget, that echoes the way that Judge Kucelj dismissed the claim against my former employer:

He leaned forward and said to Zvonimir: “But you were supposed to take those children back, weren’t you?”

Zvonimir wriggled in his seat and admitted: yes, he was.

Accordingly, Judge Kucelj on 25 November 2016 adopted a judgment ordering that the Zvonimir’s unilateral decision not to return from a holiday in Croatia violated my parental rights and the rights of our children. He correctly deciphered that on arriving in the United Kingdom with the intention to remain there for at least one year for the purposes of employment, the habitual residence of the family had changed and that any disputes as to where the family should live in the future should be resolved by agreement. Otherwise, the English courts would have jurisdiction over any legal matters.

Judge Kucelj ordered the children must return to my home address in the United Kingdom.

There is a notable remark in his judgment:

"...from the very honest records made by the Plaintiff about the time which she spent with the children after they were retained by their father, it was obvious her care, attention and love towards them and her readiness to dedicate herself despite of business obligations."

Image: excerpt from judgment Posl. br. 3 R1 Ob-179116-18 of 25.11.2016, Municipal Court in Zlatar, Croatia. Translation from the UK Official Solicitor and Public Trustee.

[Note the awkward syntax in English. I believe that the poor quality of translations is a serious barrier to access to justice in all manner of court cases. In the UK this situation deteriorated following the outsourcing of translation work to private companies. Just one instance on how the effective privatisation of the justice system is undermining the rule of law. More on this here: https://irr.org.uk/article/shambolic-and-unworkable-outsourcing-of-court-interpreting-services/]

My Croatian lawyer at that time, Eleonora Katić, told me that the evidence demonstrating what had happened was enough to order the return of the children without a hearing.

I later learned that the Croatian Judicial Academy provides training on child abduction cases which fully supports the approach that Judge Kucelj took, as does the case law.

What happened next sets the tone for how the whole thing changed course in a very dark and dangerous way.

Manipulation, fraud and threats

I found out by accident just before that judgment in November that Zvonimir had filed for divorce without my knowledge. During child abduction cases, courts and other bodies are prohibited from making child custody decisions by the Hague Convention. He said I had abandoned the family, which was patently not true - I had been left behind. He was asking for full custody of the children, the right to remain in my family’s property through the children, and 10,000 Croatian kuna per month in child maintenance. That’s over £1000 per month, five times the statutory amount in Croatia. He was trying to strip me of money, property and our children.

Image: Divorce petition, case no. P Ob-95/16

He put my address as the flat in Donja Stubica which he was occupying without my family’s permission. He was living there, and I visited when I could but never found any notice of attempted delivery of the court papers. I managed to send my lawyer to the hearing. She told me Zvonimir was shocked to see her. He thought he would get the job done behind my back.

This came as even more of a shock because at the same time he had been bombarding me with sexually explicit text messages and trying to get me to go back to him.

Image: Screenshot of a text message Zvonimir sent to me. Translation: “You just give up the court case. Stay for a week. We will make love like rabbits. I so much want to feel and hear how my balls smack while I take you from behind. I want to do everything to you that you dreamed about. We will agree on everything. I want to eat Roquefort from your bum.”

I sent this to my lawyer - no response. I told our mediator at the time (more on her later) that this behaviour worried me - she thought it was lovely. I have submitted this and similar content to the courts and police.

After we received the judgment ordering the return of the children I went back to Croatia to stay with them until they could leave with me. Nobody could tell me how the Croatians would enforce the judgment. Zvonimir refused to speak a single word to me. He left the flat on 24 December 2016, saying to the children “Daddy has something very important to do”.

I learned soon after that he had filed an appeal against the decision returning the children. My lawyer was so confident that he would get nowhere with the appeal that she suggested we didn’t even bother responding to it.

I also found euro coins in his pocket. I believe that during that time he was arranging with someone, and I have a pretty good idea with whom, how these court cases would be decided.

On 7 January, he came back, behaving as if nothing had happened. He would flirt with me, every second word was a sexual innuendo. He lovebombed me with gifts, and told me he wanted to get me pregnant. When I asked him to stop, his demeanour changed. He warned me to drop the child abduction case. If I didn’t, the children would go to live with him. “The process has already started”, he said.

Split County Court

In March we finally received the outcome of the appeal. It was decided in Split County Court. Lawyers tell me it was a legal nonsense. Nobody had raised any safeguarding concerns, but the court of appeal in Split upheld Zvonimir’s claim that the children would be exposed to grave risk of harm just by being separated from him.

That is not the meaning of “grave risk of harm” in Article 13 b of the Hague Convention. Mothers who are being battered to death cannot protect themselves under Article 13 b.

Also, the Hague Convention says nothing about who will care for the child, it just decides which country’s court will resolve any legal matters about the child. Obviously, Zvonimir was extremely eager for these things to be decided in the country that suited him. This is called “forum shopping”. Why was he so desperate to avoid the English courts?

Split County Court also questioned Judge Kucelj’s interpretation of “habitual residence”, a crucial term in international family law. It cancelled the return order and sent the case back to the court in Zlatar for repeated processing.

The judge who decided on the appeal was Vesna Kuzmičić. I would appreciate being contacted by anyone who has also had a bad experience with this judge.

Delays

By this time, 9 months had passed since I filed my request for the return of the children. Guidelines require courts to reach a final decision within six weeks.

We had had a first hearing in November 2016. My lawyer, Eleanora Katić, told me she had been approached by Zvonimir’s lawyer, Ines Bojić, who told her “Zvonimir didn’t look like someone who wanted to get divorced” and suggested we try mediation. I was told judges look favourably on parties who try to reach agreement. The UK charity Reunite told me that some couples manage to reconcile through mediation. I agreed to try, mainly because I wanted to know I had tried everything to avoid the breakdown of my marriage. I was heartbroken at the thought of the impact on the children’s lives.

My father told me he feared Zvonimir was simply trying to use mediation as a delaying tactic. He was right. Near the end of the first month, Zvonimir agreed to come back. I even started looking for a flat for us according to his demands. This is an illustration of his demands:

Image: Screenshot of a text message Zvonimir sent to me on 19 October 2016. Translation: “Dear, Hyde Park, a driver and three times a week from behind. That or nothing.”

I even found a flat I was prepared to rent for the family in Westminster. Zvonimir then did a complete about face and we were back at square one. But the mediator, Tanja Katkić Stanić, said she felt we were close to an agreement and we should extend the mediation period by another month.

Mediation should run concurrent to the hearings, it should not delay them. Either Katkić Stanić, the judge and the lawyers didn’t know that, or they deliberately let the case be delayed.

Performing a volte face is a well known indicator of mediating in bad faith. But Katkić Stanić apparently didn’t recognise that.

Tanja Katkić Stanić at the time was the Head of Zagreb Social Services and just starting out as a mediator. She today is the Head of the Sector for Social Work at the Croatian Ministry of Social Policy. Her approach to the mediation was awful. She flirted with Zvonimir, chastised me for asking my lawyer for advice (which was my right and absolutely necessary), and told me “people even forgive murderers”.

Mediation is a money-spinner built into the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts business model of what is essentially a privatised family justice system which has now rolled out across much of the world. Mediation is dangerous for victims of domestic abuse – it is discouraged under CEDAW General Recommendation 35 and prohibited under the Istanbul Convention. At this point, nobody, not my lawyers, not Reunite, was recognising that what I was reporting to them was extremely abusive behaviour. My lawyer said “Ah, that’s men from Dalmatia for you”.

After the appeal, the case dragged on for months. I was out of my mind with distress and worry. I was stuck living in a flat with the abductor of my children, and had to give up my job in the UK. Two hearings were delayed and rescheduled for a month later. When I asked my lawyer if we could hurry it up she said “no”.

I don’t know if the Croatian courts handle Hague cases differently now but at that time they had a serious problem with enforcement and the appeals process.

Second hearing

Finally a second hearing was held in September 2017. I was shocked when we arrived to see a young woman called Valentina Domitrek waiting outside the courtroom. Valentina had worked alongside Zvonimir as a nanny before we moved to the UK. After moving, Zvonimir used her to get documents for the children from our flat so he could try and change the children’s residence without my knowledge or consent. She hid information from me and cared for my children without my consent. Recently, my children told me they remember that she and their father would lock themselves into rooms alone. They called her “Dada’s fat girlfriend”.

I had asked for three witnesses to be allowed, including a local vet and a friend who had known all of us for some years.

Valentina spontaneously told the judge that she was on bad terms with me, which should have disqualified her as a hostile witness.

I waited another month for the judgment. It was a refusal to return the children.

Judge Kucelj refused to admit the evidence I provided proving that Zvonimir and I had moved to the UK and intended to stay long term by mutual agreement for the reason that it was in electronic form (emails, text messages). This was a crucial piece in the question of habitual residence and a completely arbitrary reason to dismiss the evidence. I have only recently realised this was an abuse of process that renders the judgment null and void.

The judgment reads:

“The deliberations and views of the whole situation and the understanding of the parents and friends of the Respondent [should be Applicant] in their unaddressed letters (“To whom it may concern”), the correspondence of the Parties by email and text message, from the point of view of this court and the provisions of the laws which ordain evidence and the manner of obtaining the same, cannot be accepted as evidence, and neither can the relevant facts be ascertained on their basis.”

Photo: excerpt from judgment Poslovni broj 3 R1 Ob-48/17-48, Municipal Court in Zlatar

There is a lot else wrong with this judgment in the way it interprets the Hague Convention and it needs analysis from a Hague Convention expert. Luckily, I am now in touch with many of them and am confident the picture will become clearer. But it’s the abuse of process that stands out for me now, after 6.5 years of family court. All you have to do is refuse to admit evidence and — poof! The outcome you don’t want simply disappears. I hear it again and again. Testimony from leading medical experts is ignored. Medical evidence is ignored. Family court is a Wild West where anything goes, and children’s souls are traded. For cash.

By this point 16 months had passed from the time my children were taken, and the “passage of time” was also used as a reason to deny their return. This is often couched in terms of “the best interests of the child” and not wishing to uproot their settled lives. In reality, intentional foot-dragging is a frequent abuse of process in family law cases.

Unconstitutional Court

I submitted a complaint to the Constitutional Court which simply rubber-stamped Judge Kucelj’s decision not to admit my evidence:

“…it is not the place of the Constitutional Court to evaluate which deciding facts the regular courts should establish nor which evidence submitted by the parties it must accept or reject. The decision as to which evidence the regular courts will accept lies exclusively with the courts themselves, regardless of the disposition of the parties.”

Photo: excerpt from Constitutional Court Judgment No.: U-lll-534/2018

This turns out to be a problem with civil law which affects many family law cases with devastating effect. Judges are awarded almost unlimited discretion, and courts of appeal almost always fail to challenge it. Therefore, they are granted almost free licence, and there is nothing you can do about it.

The almost complete lack of transparency, and almost complete lack of accountability, unfortunately means that legal certainty in family law is almost completely undermined.

However, how come the court of appeal in Split was able to challenge Judge Kucelj’s original decision to return the children? In the absence of any sensible answers, it is impossible to avoid conclusion that money or influence was traded.

Family Court is a Kids for Cash scandal, and I have been writing to Croatian and UK politicians about this for more than 2 years now. It is a form of child trafficking.

Freedom of Speech, Politics and Corruption

When I speak of lack of transparency in family law I mean that litigants are not supposed to talk about their cases. However, I have never been shown the point of Croatian law which prohibits you from talking about your own case. There are dark threats about the dim view taken by courts and social services of talking about your case, “in the interests of the children”. But as well as likely being a freedom of speech problem, this means that there is no public scrutiny of what is happening in private proceedings, and parents feel unable to access help. In the UK a transparency pilot has just begun and it has become accepted that lack of scrutiny probably benefits court professionals more than it does parents and children.

I am speaking openly here about my case because the blatant violations of my rights and the rights of my children mean that I have been left with no other way to protect our safety, rights and welfare. Given the huge number of serious complaints about family law cases, blasting open the doors of the family courts is of unparalleled public interest.

In 2020 I found out:

• Ingrid Antičević Marinović, who is often assumed to be Zvonimir’s relative but is actually his friend, in 2016 was made a Constitutional Court judge. This is quite staggering as her name is synonymous in Croatia with corruption.

• The perception in Croatia is that the Constitutional Court is very far from free of corruption.

• The County Court in Split is notorious for corruption.

I have learned that Judge Antičevic Marinović is closely associated with a circle of women in the family justice and child protection system including the former Head of the Zagreb Child Protection Clinic against whom allegations of professional and financial malpractice have been made.

None of this is to say I am blaming Judge Antičević Marinović. Far from it! I am just trying to get to the bottom of what happened, in the spirit of curiosity and the public interest, and protecting the welfare and safety of my children.

European Court of Human Rights – Not a Solution

At the end of 16 months of legal battles, while being subjected to coercive controlling behaviour, stalking, harassment and psychological manipulation and torture, I found myself with a lawyer who no longer seemed to have any interest in my case. I had no income and no energy whatsoever. I was trembling, thin, terrified, isolated and utterly confused.

I had also been bullied by social services, at the demand of my ex husband, to put my children needlessly into nursery school, which they hated and I had to pay for. Institutionalisation is another tool of control by abusive fathers and their Nazi handmaidens to weaken the bond between mothers and children. I don’t use the term Nazi lightly – many serious people observe fascist undertones of the state in the behaviour of public bodies towards families. One of these is the Italian Supreme Court (I will update with citations). All in the “best interests of the children”.

My children immediately picked up every virus under the sun, and so did I. I could barely scrape the energy together, but I put together a complaint for the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in Strasbourg.

I received a letter saying that my complaint was not accompanied by a full set of documents. One document that was missing was the minutes from a hearing that in effect didn’t happen in September 2016, when we simply agreed to go to mediation. As I had no time to send in the missing documents, my complaint was out of time.

I find this bad faith. Surely the complaint could be registered as received with time allocated for missing documents to be submitted?

Everywhere you turn there are barriers to justice. It turns out our justice systems are built to be opaque, expensive and impossible to navigate. They are not here to help citizens exercise their rights. They are here to uphold structural injustice.

Although I am sure there is moral satisfaction, I feel that an ECtHR decision is practically meaningless. National courts ignore them, and damages awarded are insulting. If you win your case, it simply gets sent back for retrial in the original courts. So you are stuck on a merry-go-round that is designed to drain you of money, strength and spirit.

Trading in Child Custody

The first part in the divorce case went well. I didn’t contest the divorce, but proposed that the part relating to children’s mattered be thrown out or set aside until after the child abduction case was completed. It was thrown out.

Then, in July 2017 I received a summons to a hearing on child custody matters. Zvonimir had appealed the divorce decision. Judge Slavica Garac at Zagreb County Court had ruled to reopen the case to establish habitual residence. I am not a native speaker of Croatian and can find reading Croatian difficult, but I find the text of this judgment almost impossible to understand, which is why I cannot translate it. But it is completely impossible to make sense of the notion that one court would already be establishing habitual residence in a child abduction case, and a court of appeal judge would order that another court do the same.

Photo: Appeal judgment 34 GLOb-27012017-3, Zagreb County Court

Although it sounds like an episode of Benny Hill, this was not funny at all. This was a direct breach of Article 16 of the Hague Convention, for which the European Court had already reprimanded Croatia in the case Vujica v. Croatia (application no. 56163/12). This showed me that my children and I were completely unprotected by the law in Croatia. That judges care not one jot for the law. I was terrified.

Judge Slavica Garac’s bid for a seat at the Croatian Supreme Court in 2018 fell through when she failed the Croatian intelligence services’ security checks. If anyone has any information about Judge Garac, please comment or contact me.

Judge Vinko Vladić

Back in Zagorje, the divorce and child custody proceedings were being dealt with in an outpost of the Zlatar Municipal Court in a town named Krapina.

A hearing was held on 1 September before Judge Vinko Vladić. My lawyer was unable to persuade him to stay proceedings and he listed a hearing for 5 October. Zvonimir was requesting to have a whole host of witnesses heard.

I was out of my mind with worry, and much relieved when my lawyer suggest we inform the court that we were not attending the hearing as we did not want to legitimise it by doing so.

To my relief, after hearing the testimony of Dada’s Fat Girlfriend and a couple of random people in Donja Stubica who hardly knew us, Judge Vladić did indeed stay proceedings pending the outcome of the child abduction case – since it was deciding the same question. I went through 3 months of the most extreme stress because of this County Court decision.

Vinko Vladić is at the time I write this President of the Municipal Court of Zlatar, which is now embroiled in an international child trafficking scandal. More on this in a moment.

Back in Zlatar

Judge Vladić’s decision in the child custody case was extremely disappointing, but no longer surprising. He upheld Zvonimir’s request for 50-50 shared custody despite the fact that Zvonimir had indisputably taken the children without my agreement. He knew I had struggled to find and keep a job in Croatia and wished to return home to the UK. We had provided evidence, not of abuse because my lawyer at the time, Dafinka Večerina, refused to address it, but of degrading behaviour. He knew that the children had not spent a single night with their father for two years because he had not requested it, but claimed I was obstructive although social services confirmed that this did not seem to be the case.

This judgment was successfully appealed at Zagreb County Court, which found a whole series of violations of the rights of my children. By that time I had bailed out of the process in Croatia and returned with the children to England, seeking refuge. Unfortunately a British judge refused to grant us refuge, which I will deal with in another post.

The case was sent back for repeat procedure, and in Summer 2020 we ended up back in Zlatar, with Judge Kucelj. I felt this was not a bad thing: at least he knew the history.

The case dragged on and on. Zagreb County Court had said we needed an expert witness assessment. We had to wait until December 2021 for Judge Kucelj to order that. In the meantime we went through the seven circles of hell with the Zagreb Child Protection Clinic, the Zagreb Maksimir branch of social services, the Office for Special Guardianship, expert witnesses and frauds Dubravka Kocijan-Hercigonja and Sanja Maroević who send children to abusive fathers, and the “Djeca prva” association which bullies victims of domestic abuse and is EU funded.

Photos: Dubravka Kocijan Hercigonja and Sanja Maroević

Each one of these things deserves a separate post.

I was writing to the Croatian Prime Minister, ministers, President, UK politicians about what was going on. The Croatian politicians promptly send a letter to the Children’s Ombudsman. She sent out some letters, and stopped when I started pointing the finger at the Head of the Zagreb Child Protection Clinic. Her daughter is a deputy of the Children’s Ombudsman.

Photo: Ivana Buljan, Deputy of the Croatian Children’s Ombudsman

This is why writing complaints through official channels is a waste of time. This is a network which has the whole thing stitched up. Conflict of interest is a professional requirement in child protection and family law.

The Anti-Corruption Office

I had a shock in July 2021 – Zvonimir’s lawyer delivered to the case file;

1.     A series of screenshots of my comments about the family justice system in a closed group for domestic abuse victims, showing I had been stalked online;

2.     A series of photographs of my correspondence and confidential documents held by social services in Zagreb Maksimir. A lawyer advised me this was a serious data privacy breach and likely a criminal offence.

I reported the data breach to the State Prosecutor, who sent the case to the Croatian Office for Anti-Corruption and Organised Crime (USKOK).

Photo: USKOK request to the court for the case file

In October 2022 the final hearing was held in the child custody case. Six of the people involved, Zvonimir, his lawyer Ines Bojić, and four social workers, were under suspicion of corruption. This includes the Head of Zagreb Maksimir branch of social services, Jasna Cesarec. None of them were suspended. All them continued working on our case. This is simply staggering. I wrote to the Croatian government again and… crickets.

My lawyer and I cross-examined expert witnesses Dubravka Kocijan-Hercigonja and Sanja Maroević for 2 hours. They admitted that they coerce parents into mediation by stealth: they treat assessments as opportunities for mediation, and if victims of domestic abuse refuse they take their children away. They make diagnoses with no clinical basis. They exhort victims of domestic abuse to set aside their abuse “for the sake of the children”. I will write more about this soon.

Judge Kucelj nevertheless ruled in favour of the father, not only awarding him sole custody but also sole decision-making in the areas of health and education.

He violated the rights of the children, opposing the wishes they have expressed clearly for years. I am certain that the judgment is so flawed that it can simply be considered null and void, and I am treating it as such.

I want to make it clear - I am not pointing the finger at Judge Kucelj. I believe (maybe wrongly) that he is a good man. I have been told by activists protesting about the state of the Croatian justice system that being a good judge in Croatia is a nightmare. You are harassed until you become ill, resign or are removed from your position. This is very clearly illustrated in the case of Judge Željko Rogić.

The EU needs to get involved. The EU is continually pointing the finger at Hungary and Poland. What about Croatia?

I am asking good judges to come forward and speak out. Letting children rot in misery because evil people are trading in their childhoods is despicable.

Africa

In January 2023 a scandal broke out: four Croatian couples had been detained in Zambia on suspicion of trafficking children from DR Congo to Croatia. DR Congo withdrew from the Hague Convention on International Adoption in 2013 because of child trafficking.

The Municipal Court in Zlatar was involved in issuing documents for three out of four of those couples. It has issued 1/3 of the documents for the international adoption of 131 children from Congo into Croatia since 2016.

Image: “Around one third of all adoptions of children from Congo - including three of the four indicted Croatian couples, were led by the court in Zlatar even though the adopters are not from Zlatar.” Globus magazine, 8 February 2023.

None of those three couples are resident in an area that the court in Zlatar has jurisdiction over.

Officials in the Croatian press are ascribing the issuance of these documents to mistakes, not a crimes. But it cannot be legal because the international adoption of children from Congo is not allowed.

All of the couples are prominent in Croatian public life.

They include former employees of the intelligence services, where Zvonimir used to work, and a staff member from the Croatian Constitutional Court, where his good friend Judge Ingrid Antičević Marinović works.

These are still just allegations, but this does not look like innocent people who have blundered into this situation.

In the case of my children, regardless of whether the court in Zlatar has made mistakes or committed criminal malfeasance and abuse of power, my children deserve to have this made good immediately. I will not tolerate us being messed around a single day longer, nor will I be sent round in circles in “official complaints procedures” which are set up not to work.

The Croatian Parliamentary Committee on Family, Youth and Sport is asking for an investigation into all international adoptions in Croatia. But Minister of Social Policy Marin Piletić is refusing, citing the right to a private and family life and child rights. However, any parent who has been through child custody proceedings know that social services would have no problem going through your knicker draw or gynaecological records if they had the chance. Piletić is covering this up.

There is a real risk that these children have been exploited. Croatia is two years behind schedule drafting a National Plan on human trafficking.

The Croatian public are up in arms. People in Zambia are horrified that white people are trafficking African children. This feels like the slave trade come to life again.

Image: Historic poster advertising “Negroes for Sale”. Via @modestyqueen on Twitter.

The status of women and children in Croatia is not much better. The first draft report on the implementation of the Istanbul Convention in Croatia is ready for review, and according to insider information in may parts the government hasn’t even started to implement the Convention. Child custody cases have been highlighted as a serious area of concern by shadow rapporteurs.

Where I am now

Six and a half years is too long for my children’s voices not to be heard, for their rights to be unprotected, for their health and development to be undermined.

I can no longer wait for legal systems that do not protect us.

I am taking a stand. I will not allow unlawful decisions and incompetent officials to impact my children’s wellbeing and life outcomes a single day longer. To ruin their childhoods. I will simply ignore them and am asking for immediate help.

I am these children’s mother. I brought them into this world to do my best for them, and no-one will take that away from me. Not their father, not corrupt and incompetent courts. Not corrupt social workers. Not the police.

If anyone has a problem with me finally taking a stand to protect my children, call the police, do it now. And I will tell them exactly who they should be talking to.

If you have any information to help shed more light on what has been going on please comment or contact me on Twitter: @natalyanderson.

See you soon.