Vancouver court gets serious

Woman accused of abducting her children to France is denied bail at 19:22 on May 11, 2006, EST.
http://www.940news.com/nouvelles.php?cat=23&id=511119

VANCOUVER (CP) – A woman accused of abducting her two children and hiding out in France has been denied bail and ordered to stay in prison while she is pregnant.

Nathalie Gettliffe-Grant will stay in jail until her trial date is set July 17, a judge has ruled. “Obviously we’re not happy with the decision and we’re obviously very disappointed,” the woman’s lawyer, Deanne Gaffar, said outside court. “It is very much a lot of stress, particularly for someone who’s pregnant.”

Gettliffe-Grant’s ex-husband Scott Grant was at the bail hearing Thursday. He said after the hearing he hopes his former partner pleads guilty.

“My hope is that she pleads guilty and that there’s no trial and that she saves herself a lot of grief, because it will be the most terrible thing she’ll ever go through, to go through that trial.
“I think even today might have been a shock to her, so I hope there is no trial.”

Gettliffe-Grant landed at the centre of an international child abduction case.

She is accused of spiriting her children out of the country to France after a 2001 B.C. Supreme Court decision refused her request to take the children to visit their grandmother there.
Gettliffe-Grant’s ex-husband took the case to court in France where he won three rulings, including one by the country’s top court.

He said outside court Thursday that he does worry that his he is being painted as ‘the bad guy” who put the mother of his children in jail.

His ex-wife was arrested last month at the Vancouver airport when she returned to defend a doctoral thesis at the University of British Columbia.

Grant took the abduction case to court in France, where he won three successive rulings. One was handed down on Feb. 14 by the country’s top court and stated that Gettliffe-Grant had breached the Hague Convention on Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction and that the children should be returned to Canada.

It has become one of the longest parental child-abduction cases handled by the provincial office.
She could face up to 10 years in prison in Canada on two counts of child abduction.

The case has taken on a nasty flavor.