Little-Acorn
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Families in Germany are being threatened with jail time and having their kids taken away, if they homeschool their own kids.
Coming soon to a state near you?
In the People's Republic of California, the state Supreme Court has already declared that homeschooling is illegal if the people doing the teaching (usually parents) aren't state-accredited teachers. How much longer will it be before the leftist extremists riunnig the state's government, follow the lead of their ideological soulmates in Germany?
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http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=64093
Parents losing custody for homeschooling kids
'Law seen as logical step in carving up family rights'
By Bob Unruh
Posted: May 12, 2008
9:20 pm Eastern
A German couple already being threatened with jail time because they have been homeschooling their children say their nation has taken a turn for the worse, with a new federal law that gives family courts the authority to take custody of children "as soon as there is a suspicion of child abuse," which is how that nation's courts have defined homeschooling.
"The new law is seen as a logical step in carving up family rights after a federal court had decided that homeschooling was an abuse of custody," said a letter from Jurgen Dudek to officials with the U.S.-based Home School Legal Defense Association, an international advocacy organization in support of homeschooling.
It was about a year ago when WND reported a prosecutor in the German state of Hesse was seeking three-month prison terms for Jurgen Dudek and his wife, Rosemarie, the parents of six children, even after they already had paid a series of fines.
Officials with Netzwork-Bildungsfreiheit, a German homeschool advocacy group, said the prosecutor, unsatisfied with the fines, wanted 90-day terms in custody for the parents.
The latest letter from the family described the new law as granting various local social services agencies vast new powers, especially the "Jugendamt" offices, which are responsible for looking into situations if there are allegations of "child abuse."
"They have in effect been authorized to give expert evidence in court which the family judge has to follow … The withdrawal of parental custody as one of the methods for punishing 'uncooperative' parents thus is made even easier," the letter said.
In recent years Germany has established a reputation for cracking down on parents who object, for reasons ranging from religious to social, to that nation's public school indoctrination of their children.
WND has reported several times on custody battles, children being taken into custody, and families even fleeing Germany because of the situation.
Now comes the new law that, according to Dudek's letter, has, "understandably, led to a kind of panic among the homeschool community in a country where ever since Hitler's times it has been against the law to educate your offspring completely without the state."
Mike Donnelly, a lawyer for the HSLDA who has worked on situations that have developed in Germany, said it's not exactly clear how the law will affect the situation.
However, "the fact that Germany's Federal Government would pass a law taking away due process when it comes to taking children away from their parents just because they are not attending school points to the sheer hostility of the German government towards homeschooling," he told WND.
"The German Jugendamt system is under increasing scrutiny by the European Union as well as other international organizations because of the sheer numbers of custody cases in proportion to actual substantiated abuse and in relation to the overall population," he said. "For homeschoolers, the Jugendamt represents the tip of the spear in the government's persecution of parents who simply wish to educate their children privately at home – a freedom protected by governments of virtually all free societies."
Coming soon to a state near you?
In the People's Republic of California, the state Supreme Court has already declared that homeschooling is illegal if the people doing the teaching (usually parents) aren't state-accredited teachers. How much longer will it be before the leftist extremists riunnig the state's government, follow the lead of their ideological soulmates in Germany?
-------------------------------------------------
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=64093
Parents losing custody for homeschooling kids
'Law seen as logical step in carving up family rights'
By Bob Unruh
Posted: May 12, 2008
9:20 pm Eastern
A German couple already being threatened with jail time because they have been homeschooling their children say their nation has taken a turn for the worse, with a new federal law that gives family courts the authority to take custody of children "as soon as there is a suspicion of child abuse," which is how that nation's courts have defined homeschooling.
"The new law is seen as a logical step in carving up family rights after a federal court had decided that homeschooling was an abuse of custody," said a letter from Jurgen Dudek to officials with the U.S.-based Home School Legal Defense Association, an international advocacy organization in support of homeschooling.
It was about a year ago when WND reported a prosecutor in the German state of Hesse was seeking three-month prison terms for Jurgen Dudek and his wife, Rosemarie, the parents of six children, even after they already had paid a series of fines.
Officials with Netzwork-Bildungsfreiheit, a German homeschool advocacy group, said the prosecutor, unsatisfied with the fines, wanted 90-day terms in custody for the parents.
The latest letter from the family described the new law as granting various local social services agencies vast new powers, especially the "Jugendamt" offices, which are responsible for looking into situations if there are allegations of "child abuse."
"They have in effect been authorized to give expert evidence in court which the family judge has to follow … The withdrawal of parental custody as one of the methods for punishing 'uncooperative' parents thus is made even easier," the letter said.
In recent years Germany has established a reputation for cracking down on parents who object, for reasons ranging from religious to social, to that nation's public school indoctrination of their children.
WND has reported several times on custody battles, children being taken into custody, and families even fleeing Germany because of the situation.
Now comes the new law that, according to Dudek's letter, has, "understandably, led to a kind of panic among the homeschool community in a country where ever since Hitler's times it has been against the law to educate your offspring completely without the state."
Mike Donnelly, a lawyer for the HSLDA who has worked on situations that have developed in Germany, said it's not exactly clear how the law will affect the situation.
However, "the fact that Germany's Federal Government would pass a law taking away due process when it comes to taking children away from their parents just because they are not attending school points to the sheer hostility of the German government towards homeschooling," he told WND.
"The German Jugendamt system is under increasing scrutiny by the European Union as well as other international organizations because of the sheer numbers of custody cases in proportion to actual substantiated abuse and in relation to the overall population," he said. "For homeschoolers, the Jugendamt represents the tip of the spear in the government's persecution of parents who simply wish to educate their children privately at home – a freedom protected by governments of virtually all free societies."
