Word: sean
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...hard to watch the judicial farce playing out in Brazil right now and not remember the one that began during the holiday season here in Miami 10 years ago. Brazil's Supreme Court on Thursday halted the return of nine-year-old Sean Goldman to his American father - even though international law clearly dictated that the boy should have been handed over when his mother, who had absconded to South America with the child five years ago, died last year. It sounds a lot like the case of Elián González, the six-year-old Cuban...
...Sean Goldman case sounds so much like the Elián González case, in fact, that Brazil has opened itself to charges of especially egregious hypocrisy. It's no secret that Brazil, especially under hugely popular President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has become a hemispheric counterweight to the U.S. And it loves to play tit-for-tat with Washington. Because Washington still insists Brazilians secure a visa before entering the U.S., Brasilia makes Americans pay for a "reciprocal" permit to get into Brazil; after the U.S. started thumb-printing foreigners in immigration lines after 9/11...
Which makes it all the more embarrassing that Brazil would play the judicial perpetrator in the Goldman debacle. Sean was a four-year-old toddler in 2004 when his mother, Bruna Bianchi, took him from New Jersey for what was supposed to be a two-week visit to her family in Rio de Janeiro. She instead stayed, filed for a divorce from her husband David Goldman and essentially abducted Sean from him. That's what a U.S. court ruled anyway, ordering that the boy be returned to his father. But a Brazilian court instead granted custody to Bianchi, who remarried...
Remarkably, even after she died in childbirth last year, David still had to fight a legal battle to win custody of Sean from the boy's Rio stepfather. And keep in mind, it isn't as if David barely knows Sean: before the abduction he'd helped raise his son for four years. Most fathers would agree that losing the past five years after that - the first little-league games, reading lessons, trips to Disney World - would have been wrenching. It would have been as if Juan Miguel González had lost Elián for seven years instead...
...federal court in Rio finally did the right thing last summer and ruled that Sean and David should be reunited. An appellate court upheld that ruling on Wednesday, and David flew to Rio on Thursday hoping to bring Sean back home for Christmas. But in a move that rivals the most disgraceful machinations of the Elián episode, Brazil's Supreme Court ruled as David arrived that the case requires further review. Now, the soonest the father can hope to be reunited with the son, if he can hope for that at all, is February...