On Al Fitr Holiday, the security forces accompanied by Marwan Sidani, father of 9-year-old Fares, arrived at the house of Fares’s mother, Maysaa Mansour, and seized her son in observance of a decision by Beirut Attorney General and in implementation of a ruling issued by the Sunni Sharia Court to this effect. The security forces took the child by force through storming the doors of the house after his mother refused to turn him in. But following the wide public condemnation of a video shared on regular media channels and social media, the General Directorate of the Internal Security Forces, sustained in a statement released yesterday that it was implementing the law in accordance with the decision of the competent judiciary. Citing judicial sources, An Nahar newspaper wrote that the ISF squad broke into the house after the mother refused to open the door to sign a pledge requiring her to give in her child or to detain her if she refused to do that. An Nahar also criticized the law which agrees to taking a child by force in the presence of the officer in charge of execution, which, it pointed, could affect the psychological condition of the child. The newspaper published the court ruling which provides the reasons for the issuance of a rare verdict that drops the mother’s right in the custody of her son until the age of 12, and assumes the father’s version of the story that the mother denied him access to their child. The mother has contradicted the claims and submitted relevant evidence to the case during the legal process. More on the following link: (https://bit.ly/2HV11mP). On the subject, the Minister of Justice in the caretaker government, Salim Jreisati, announced in a television interview on Monday, that he will take care of the issue, promising to announce the outcome in an official statement. (An Nahar, Al Mustaqbal, June 18, 2018)
