Illustrative Image: Child and parent. (Image: Freepik) | World map. (Image: Freepik) | Lady Justice scales. (Photo: Istock) | (By Daniella Lee Ming Yesca) 
There are well-meaning international treaties whose names develop unintended but chilling connotations.
Among certain circles of foreign women trying to leave abusive relationships with their children, the Hague Convention has become one of them.
It has even acquired a verb. To be “Hagued” is to be caught by the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction: a treaty adopted in 1980 to prevent children being unlawfully removed across borders, but which critics say is now routinely weaponised by abusive partners to prevent women and children from escaping violence.
“It has become a fearful term among women in foreign countries who cannot leave with their children for fear of vengeful partners,” says Katherine, a South African woman whose daughter and granddaughter are trapped in South Korea.
(Katherine is a pseudonym, for safety reasons.)
“If people understood that it means that South African citizens can’t come home … that to me is just completely horrifying.”
Domestic violence irrelevant
“Under The Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction 1980, a child is considered abducted if they are taken across international borders by one parent without the other parent’s consent,” explains the website of Hague Mothers, a lobby group formed by women who say they have been harmed by the treaty.
“The motive for taking the child is not relevant.”
The Hague Convention sprang out of a very particular historical period where Western diplomats, in particular, were responding to social anxieties around rising divorce rates and the fear of paternal child abduction.
The convention was drafted at a moment when “there was a consensus, supported by limited data, that fathers who had lost custody of their children were kidnapping them and hiding them abroad, leaving mothers with no means of redress”, according to an investigation published in June 2025 by the NGO The 19th.
Forty-five years later, the gendered reality looks very different.
“The issue now is that the vast majority of people seeking to take a child across borders without the consent of one parent are women trying to flee situations of abuse and domestic violence,” according to Hague Mothers.
“But now they have to ask an abusive partner for consent.”
That contradiction — asking a violent partner for permission to escape — is at the heart of the injustice that critics identify.
A South African family stranded
Katherine had never heard of the Hague Convention until she was told by a lawyer that her daughter could not return home.
“My South African-born daughter is trapped in South Korea because her aggressive South Korean husband kidnapped their two-year-old baby in December 2024,” she told Daily Maverick.
“We were told by the Family Court office in Pretoria that even if she managed to get her daughter back home, South Africa would send them both back to Korea because she had travelled here without his permission.”
Katherine travelled to South Korea in 2024 to try to mediate between her daughter, whom we will call Sarah, and her son-in-law after Sarah had asked for a separation.
“She wanted to separate from him because he has violence issues, which had become more prevalent since the baby was born, and she was fearful,” says Katherine.
One night, she says, she and Sarah were spending time together in a guest room. Her granddaughter had a high fever.
“At about midnight, my daughter tried to check on her temperature, and the flat was empty.”
The husband had taken the baby, confiscated Sarah’s car keys, cut off her access to their joint bank account and fled to his family home, some 2½ hours away.
“We called the police, and the police said they wouldn’t do anything because it was a civil affair,” says Katherine.
They immediately contacted lawyers, which is when they were told about the Hague Convention.
In South Korea, custody of a child of divorced parents is generally a zero-sum game, with one parent almost always awarded sole custody. Katherine says it is unclear how much being a foreign national might hurt Sarah’s case.
Sarah’s divorce and custody applications are still going through the Korean courts, but even if Sarah is granted full custody, it is still unclear whether she would have the right to take her child — who also has a South African passport — back to South Africa.
For the past year, Sarah has been permitted to see her now almost four-year-old daughter just twice a month for two nights, with two weekly phone calls.
When she attempted to seek help from a South Korean women’s NGO, Katherine says Sarah was asked: ‘What did you do to make your husband angry?’
A treaty under pressure
South Africa is one of around 100 countries which are signatories to the Hague Convention, with its provisions embedded in the Children’s Act of 2005.
Pressure for reform is mounting globally. The 19th reports that since 2000, Switzerland, Japan and Australia have passed laws that offer some degree of protection to abuse victims fighting Hague petitions. Brazil may follow. India, after a feminist mobilisation in 2016, chose not to sign the treaty at all.
In 2023, a coalition of domestic violence victims and their allies delivered more than 37,000 signatures criticising the Convention to the Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCCH).
That prompted a multinational forum in Sandton in June 2024 — the first dedicated to the implications of domestic violence to the convention.
Opening the conference, HCCH Secretary-General Christophe Bernasconi acknowledged the human cost.
“I am, first and foremost, genuinely disturbed when I hear that a return has exposed a mother to renewed violence, with sometimes tragic endings,” he said. “We all agree that such tragic endings must be prevented.”
But Bernasconi also struck a decidedly defensive note.
“I also firmly believe that we are fortunate to have the convention. It is the only global instrument dealing with child abduction. The existence of the convention prevents abductions. Let’s not forget: a wrongful removal is also a form of violence.”
The investigation by The 19th found that 77% of cases filed in US courts under the Hague Convention between 2022 and 2024 were filed by men attempting to prevent women and children from leaving, or to secure their return.
Responding, mothers “commonly said in court papers that their exes had raped, strangled or threatened to kill them abroad, often in front of the children”.
There have been multiple cases where either the mother petitioning to leave, or more rarely the child, has ended up dead at the hands of abusive fathers preventing them from leaving the country.
Mothers seeking to leave often cite the Hague Convention’s “grave risk” exception, The 19th found, which allows judges to deny the father’s claim if staying in the country could expose the children to harm or an “intolerable situation”.
A major problem: “In many cases, judges said the exception didn’t apply because the alleged abuse mainly targeted the mother, whose safety isn’t addressed in the treaty.”
Dirco admits many South Africans stuck
Asked for comment on the matter, Dirco spokesperson Chrispin Phiri said the situation was complex.
“This is a complaint by parents in distress abroad faced regularly by our missions and consular services. As a country, we cannot intervene in the laws and policies of other countries,” said Phiri.
“South Africa applies the same; you cannot leave with a minor child without an affidavit by the other parent. Immigration will not let you through.”
Part of the issue seems to be that it falls between the ambit of three different departments: the Department of Justice, the Department of Social Development and the Department of International Relations and Cooperation (Dirco).
For Katherine, there is one potential ray of light, although it’s a long shot: the Department of Social Development invited the public in September to provide submissions on amendments to the Children’s Act, the law under which the Hague Convention provisions fall in South Africa.
Katherine has joined the Hague Mothers group, as the only member from Africa, and says she hopes to build up a local lobby to create momentum for South African reform.
She says that Sarah’s position is simple: “She says, ‘When I have to tell my child my story, I have to be able to say to her I did absolutely everything I could to get her back’.” DM