18 U.S.C. § 1204 — International parental kidnapping

(a) It is a crime to remove a child from the United States, or try to, in order to interfere with someone else's parental rights. It is also a crime to keep a child outside the United States for that reason, if the child had been in the United States. The penalty is a fine, up to 3 years in prison, or both. (b) This subsection defines two terms. A "child" is anyone under 16 years old. "Parental rights" means the right to physical custody of a child. This includes joint or sole custody and visiting rights. It applies whether the right comes from a law, a court order, or a binding agreement between the parties. (c) There are three defenses to this crime. First, the defendant acted under a valid custody or visitation order, issued under specific child custody laws and in effect at the time. Second, the defendant was fleeing domestic violence. Third, the defendant had lawful custody but could not return the child due to circumstances beyond their control. This defense also requires that the defendant tried to notify the other parent within 24 hours, and returned the child as soon as possible. (d) This section does not take away from The Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Parental Child Abduction, an international treaty from 1980.

The record. According to the source credit, this section was added by Public Law 103–173, § 2(a), enacted December 2, 1993, and published at 107 Stat. 1998. It was subsequently amended once, by Public Law 108–21, title I, § 107, dated April 30, 2003, and published at 117 Stat. 655. The source credit does not describe the substance of that amendment beyond its citation. Historical context. Public Law 103–173 is commonly known as the International Parental Kidnapping Crime Act of 1993. The Act is generally understood to have been enacted in response to concerns that existing federal law did not adequately address situations in which a parent removed a child from the United States, or retained a child abroad, in order to circumvent another parent's custodial or visitation rights. Prior to this legislation, remedies for such conduct were largely civil in nature, including those available under the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, and cross-border removal was not itself treated as a distinct federal criminal offense. The commonly cited purpose of the Act was to create a federal criminal remedy to deter international parental kidnapping and to supplement, rather than displace, existing civil mechanisms such as the Hague Convention, a relationship reflected in subsection (d) of the statutory text. The 2003 amendment postdates the original enactment by a decade, coinciding with a period of broader federal legislative activity concerning child protection, but the record here does not establish the specific legislative purpose behind that amendment, and none should be inferred.