by Bob Collins
Sorry, aunts. You don't have any right to visit your nieces and nephews, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled this week in the case of a woman who wanted visitation rights with the daughter of her now-deceased twin sister.
The court ruled on the appeal of Kelli Rohmiller. After her sister and her boyfriend, Andrew Hart (the girl's father) split up, the girl and her mother lived with Rohmiller for five weeks. But when Ms. Rohmiller's sister died, Hart was awarded custody of the girl and cut Rohmiller off from visiting her niece.
A district court granted Rohmiller and her father unsupervised visitation with the girl, but the Court of Appeals reversed the ruling, saying Minnesota law does not grant a right to visitation to aunts.
In Minnesota, the law grants visitation rights to grandparents and great-grandparents as well as people with whom a child has lived for at least two years if the parent of a child is deceased. But Supreme Court Justice Lori Gildea said neither provision applies in this case.
"If the legislature wanted to include aunts as a class of individuals who could petition for visitation, it could have," she wrote.
Rohmiller said it would be "absurd" for the legislature to exclude step-parents, step-grandparents, step-siblings, cousins and "significant others" from visitation simply because they had not lived with a child for two years because "there is no magic relationship that is formed after two years."
The Supreme Court rejected the argument. "We have not found any reported Minnesota cases in which, over a fit custodial parent's objection, visitation was awarded to a non-parent who was not standing in loco parentis (ed. note: had parenting functions) with the child," Gildea said.
Since the father allowed the girl's grandfather to visit her, the Court said its decision this week would not prevent Rohmiller from being present when he does.
Here's the full opinion.
Source http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/news_cut/archive/2012/03/court_aunts_have_no_visitation.shtml
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Showing posts with label children's rights. Show all posts
Showing posts with label children's rights. Show all posts
Friday, March 2, 2012
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Effort at Parental Rights Amendment in Georgia Stalls
Georgia parents could no longer put their children in time-outs or impose other discipline if the U.S. Senate ratifies an international treaty on children’s rights. Or so says state Rep. Jay Neal (R-LaFayette) and other backers of a proposed Parental Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Neal asked state House colleagues Tuesday to call on Congress to back a constitutional amendment declaring that parents – not the government — have the right to direct their children’s upbringing and education.
But the clock ran out during a time-shortened meeting of the House Children and Youth Committee, and Neal’s resolution was tabled, quite possibly killing it for this year’s legislative session. The motion to table passed on a 9-7 vote.
Parentalrights.org, whose top officers run the Virginia-based Home School Legal Defense Association, is backing the amendment nationally. In Georgia, the group’s leader is Jonathan Crumly, attorney for a non-profit that helps funnel tax-subsidized scholarships to students attending private Christian schools.
Crumly told committee members Tuesday that the treaty — the United Nation Convention on the Rights of the Child – under Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution, would become “the law of the land” if ratified. As such, he said, the treaty would override state laws regarding discipline, education and determinations of child neglect or abuse.
The treaty would prevent parents from imposing any discipline that is “unnecessarily embarrassing or confrontational,” he said, “and that can and has included things like simple timeouts.”
Advocates also fear the treaty could prevent parents from instilling religious views in their children, Crumly said.
Democrats on the committee pushed back, saying the amendment is not needed and is based on faulty interpretations of the treaty and U.S. Supreme Court decisions on parental rights.
The United States and Somalia are the only countries in the world that have not ratified the United Nation Convention on the Rights of the Child, which took effect in 1990.
Source http://jjie.org/measure-georgia/76241
Neal asked state House colleagues Tuesday to call on Congress to back a constitutional amendment declaring that parents – not the government — have the right to direct their children’s upbringing and education.
But the clock ran out during a time-shortened meeting of the House Children and Youth Committee, and Neal’s resolution was tabled, quite possibly killing it for this year’s legislative session. The motion to table passed on a 9-7 vote.
Parentalrights.org, whose top officers run the Virginia-based Home School Legal Defense Association, is backing the amendment nationally. In Georgia, the group’s leader is Jonathan Crumly, attorney for a non-profit that helps funnel tax-subsidized scholarships to students attending private Christian schools.
Crumly told committee members Tuesday that the treaty — the United Nation Convention on the Rights of the Child – under Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution, would become “the law of the land” if ratified. As such, he said, the treaty would override state laws regarding discipline, education and determinations of child neglect or abuse.
The treaty would prevent parents from imposing any discipline that is “unnecessarily embarrassing or confrontational,” he said, “and that can and has included things like simple timeouts.”
Advocates also fear the treaty could prevent parents from instilling religious views in their children, Crumly said.
Democrats on the committee pushed back, saying the amendment is not needed and is based on faulty interpretations of the treaty and U.S. Supreme Court decisions on parental rights.
The United States and Somalia are the only countries in the world that have not ratified the United Nation Convention on the Rights of the Child, which took effect in 1990.
Source http://jjie.org/measure-georgia/76241
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