Coercive decisions in Switzerland, from the perspective of international standards: foster care placement

Philip D. Jaffé
 

Full Professor at the Centre for Children's Rights Studies at the University of Geneva (Campus Valais, Sion), he is also a member of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child. He has been involved in research, teaching and advocacy in the field of children's rights and child protection for several decades. Most recently, he is co-leader of the Cottier Research (see below) and is currently responsible for an interim evaluation of the child protection reform of the canton of Neuchâtel. His extensive experience in children's rights and psychology will ensure an interdisciplinary approach to research methodology, recommendations and results.

Christina Baglietto

Christina Baglietto  has over 15 years of experience in alternative care and adoption. She has experience in legislative, policy, institutional and practical reform contexts in these areas. She has worked in the area of ​​monitoring illegal adoptions in Guatemala, where she contributed to the implementation of new national laws and international standards. She provided training and developed SOPs (standard operating procedures) for the Central Authority’s multidisciplinary team. She also contributed to an evaluation of legal and policy responses to adoptions in Colombia. She has provided training and technical support, including in Cyprus, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Moldova, Panama and Romania. Fluent in English, French, German and Spanish, her strong experience will ensure a rigorous approach to research. 

Laurence Bordier
 

Laurence Bordier  is a Swiss lawyer, qualified as a barrister. After working in the fields of commercial and corporate law, she has worked for over ten years in the field of children's rights, particularly in alternative care and adoption. She has specialized in comparative legal research, having written over 20 country analyses, examining legislation, practices, as well as promising practices, with the aim of providing concrete tools to professionals to improve their practices.

Mia Dambach
 

Australian lawyer with over 20 years of experience in children’s rights. She has successfully led multiple international inter-agency projects. She has provided technical support through assessment missions (qualitative research) to Cambodia, Denmark, Egypt, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Sudan, Ukraine, Vietnam, etc., and has been involved in the implementation of legislative reforms and training in over 20 countries, focusing on alternative care and adoption. She has contributed to the reform of international standards, with a focus on their application, including through comparative research on illegal adoptions, tracing, risks related to financial contributions, kafalah conversions to adoption and, as an expert on the HCCH Working Group, on illicit adoption practices. Fluent in English, French and Filipino, she brings her leadership, project management and research skills to ensure the concrete success of this project.

Cecile Jeannin
 

Cécile Jeannin is a French lawyer with over 15 years of experience in alternative care and adoption. She has conducted qualitative research on these topics in Denmark, Côte d’Ivoire and Mexico, and has provided training and technical assistance to over ten countries. She led the ISS/CIR Research and Publications Unit, coordinating the monthly newsletter distributed to over 5,000 professionals and conducting over 100 country analyses. She is ideally qualified to lead qualitative research in the French-speaking canton, given her background in political science, law and family mediation, and her fluency in English, French and Spanish.

Alexandra Levy
 

Alexandra has a degree in French law with a specialization in European law. After 4 years of experience in an American investment bank, she turned to teaching and obtained a primary school teacher diploma. She then taught for 12 years in Belgium and Poland in primary school, holding various positions. She also has experience in the written press in Poland, where she directed an online French-language daily newspaper. She is currently doing an internship at Child Identity Protection as part of her interdisciplinary Master's degree in children's rights at the University of Geneva.

Andreas von Känel
 

An anthropologist by training, he has worked since 2009 between fundamental research and the evaluation of projects and programs of international cooperation and humanitarian aid. In addition to mandates in the fields of sustainable development, public health and refugee protection, he has conducted long-term field surveys on humanitarian educational systems.

Dr. Patricia Fronek

Patricia Fronek – School of Human Services and Social Work, Griffith University, Australia. An international expert, she brings expertise in project management, qualitative research and mixed methods research, and extensive research and practice experience in intercountry and domestic adoption, as well as alternative care in international contexts, from a social justice and human rights perspective. She has worked closely with people who have experienced coercive practices, including families and adopted adults, and has trained practitioners in these areas. 

Prof. David Smolin

A professor of law at Samford University, he is considered a world leader on the subject of illegal adoptions, including coercive practices, in light of international standards. He has served as an independent expert for the Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCCH) on issues relating to intercountry adoptions and has served as an external expert for the ISS/IRC. He has written numerous publications on illegal adoptions, with a particular focus on India, Switzerland's principal State of origin.

Dr Gaelle Aeby

Gaëlle Aeby holds a PhD in social sciences, is a scientific collaborator at the University of Geneva and a scientific assistant at the Geneva School of Social Work. She is currently involved in the Cottier research (see below) on how children and parents experience and understand the actions of child protection authorities (APEA) and how they react to them. She was recently awarded the lead of a project on foster families (Fondation Palatin). Previously, she conducted research on foster care in Geneva and on the transition to adulthood after placement in foster care or in a home. She is keenly interested in innovative research designs combining quantitative and qualitative methods and interdisciplinary research.

Maud de Boer-Buquicchio

Maud de Boer-Buquicchio, is internationally recognised as a leading expert on human rights. She was appointed UN Special Rapporteur on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography (2014 - 2020) and was Deputy Secretary General of the Council of Europe (2002 - 2012). Throughout her mandates, she focused her attention on combating discrimination and violence, on the rights of the most vulnerable groups, in particular children. She led work in three Council of Europe conventions, including the Convention on the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse and the Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence. She will bring her years of experience in dealing with sensitive issues related to coercive decisions.

Prof. Andrea Büchler

Andrea Büchler – is Chair of Private and Comparative Law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Zurich. In the Swiss context, she is particularly interested in all aspects of family law in an interdisciplinary context, children and guardianship law and law. She brings her extensive knowledge of comparative law, foreign and international private law and legal studies, especially cultural studies and gender legal studies. She has led and collaborated on dozens of qualitative research projects, written numerous publications and is a member of several associations and boards, including PACH.

Dr Nigel Cantwell

Nigel Cantwell - a Geneva-based child protection policy consultant, brings over 40 years of international experience to the project. He coordinated civil society input into the drafting of the Convention on the Rights of the Child in the 1980s. Later, at UNICEF’s Innocenti Research Centre, he led the analysis of child protection issues for six years, and then became a senior consultant on the development of the UN Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children. He is a UNICEF expert on child rights issues related to intercountry adoptions. In 2017, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Strathclyde in recognition of his work.

Prof Michelle Cottier

Michelle Cottier is Professor of Private Law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Geneva. Her areas of expertise include Swiss and comparative family law, sociology of law and interdisciplinarity in law. Previously, she was an assistant professor at the University of Basel, a visiting professor at Humboldt University Berlin and a deputy judge at the Court of Appeal of the Canton of Basel-Stadt, Switzerland. Michelle Cottier is a member of the board and one of the leaders of the "Cluster on Children and Youth Politics" at the Swiss Centre of Expertise on Human Rights and Director of the Centre for Legislative Studies, Techniques and Evaluation (CETEL) at the University of Geneva. She is the Professor responsible for the research on how children and parents experience, understand and react to the actions of child protection authorities (CPAAs).

Dr. Gaëlle Sauthier

Gaëlle Sauthier currently chairs an APEA in Valais. After a bachelor's degree in law (2009), she obtained her lawyer's certificate in 2013, followed training in mediation (2016) and defended her doctoral thesis in 2018, on the problem of violence from children to parents. Since 2018, she has collaborated on the Cottier research (see above) and is currently studying the participation of the parties in the procedure from 1907 to the present day. Consequently, she has in-depth knowledge of the child protection system, both theoretical and practical.

Prof. Stefan Schnurr

Stefan Schnurr is Professor of Social Work. He heads the Institute for Child and Youth Services Studies at the FHNW School of Social Work. He has written numerous publications on child referral procedures in Switzerland (Schnurr, 2017) and co-developed a procedural manual for the dialogic and systemic assessment of child welfare (Biesel et al. 2013). He co-coordinates the European Interdisciplinary Socio-Legal Care Order Decision Making Network. He is co-responsible for the research conducted by Michelle Cottier (see above).