On March 10th, two important child welfare case decisions were made by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). Unanimous convictions were made in both cases, clearly and strongly denouncing Norwegian authorities.
In each case, Norway was found in violation of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Article 8 of the Convention describes the right to respect for private and family life. It states:
“1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.
2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.” (Guide on Article 8)
EHtCR judges found that Norwegian officials were guilty of unexcused and unbridled intrusion into normal family life in the March 10th decisions. These same officials/authorities were found guilty of being “responsible for a situation of family breakdown.”
In the case of HERNEHULT v. NORWAY, the Court noted a recent case where precedent had been clearly declared:
“61. The general principles applicable to cases involving child welfare measures, including measures such as those at issue in the present case, are well-established in the Court’s case-law, and were recently extensively set out in the case of Strand Lobben and Others v. Norway.”
Back in September (10 September 2019), in the case of STRAND LOBBEN AND OTHERS v. NORWAY, the ECtHR judges in Strasbourg found Norway in violation of Article 8 by a vote of thirteen to four.
In the second case decided on March 10th, PEDERSEN AND OTHERS v. NORWAY, the Court also referred to the Strand Lobben case:
“39. Other relevant material relating to domestic and international law is referred to in the Court’s recent judgment in the case of Strand Lobben and Others v. Norway.”
The citation of previous litigation in both HERNEHULT v. NORWAY and PEDERSEN AND OTHERS v. NORWAY explains how the Court came to its united condemnation.
The two cases have several similarities. One is that the wives in each case were not born in Norway. Hernehult’s wife is a Romanian national, and Pedersen’s wife comes from the Philippines.
Each case originated in an application against the Kingdom of Norway lodged with the ECtHR under Article 34 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. Hernehult applied in March of 2016 and the Pedersens applied in August of 2015. The Hernehult settlement was 26,893 U.S. dollars for non-pecuniary damage, and the Pedersen settlement was 37,637 U.S. dollars for non-pecuniary damage and 10,216 U.S. dollars for costs and expenses.
Over 20 similar cases are slated to be decided by the EHtCR in the coming months. No one knows how many more applications against the Kingdom of Norway are forthcoming.
Editorial
How many more decisions like this will have to be made before the Norwegian Child Welfare Services, otherwise known as the Barnevernet, will begin to see that the world is waking up to its crimes? I am pleased by these wise decisions of the ECtHR. It is obvious that they can now see through all of the miasma belched into our habitat by the Barnevernet and Norwegian officials. I’m not aware of anyone who is satisfied with the settlements made, but these recent decisions are steps in the right direction certainly. The ECtHR’s references to the Lobben case in the March 10 decisions reveal recent, positive movement. The court is clear…it is using “well-established” “case law” for its decisions. I am very thankful and yet…
How can any reparations repay someone for a child stolen?
In the Pedersen case, paragraph 68 of the ECtHR judgment speaks for itself:
68. The Court emphasizes that to the extent that these decisions implied that the authorities had given up reunification of the child and the natural parents as the ultimate goal, the conclusion that placement must be considered to be long-term should only have been drawn after careful consideration and also taking account of the authorities’ positive duty to take measures to facilitate family reunion. However, in this case the decision to impose a very strict visiting regime cemented the situation at the very outset, making it highly probably that the child would become attached to the foster parents and alienated from the natural parents, thus precluding any realistic possibility of eventual reunification. Indeed, this is precisely what happened in the present case. In this respect, the Court recalls that where the authorities are responsible for a situation of family breakdown because they have failed in their obligation to take measures to facilitate family reunification, they may not base a decision to authorize adoption on the grounds of the absence of bonds between the parents and the child (see Strand Lobben and Others, cited above, § 208).
You can read the details of the case and the court’s decision HERE.
In, 2013, Mr. Dan Mikael Hernehult moved to Norway with his wife and three boys and before the year was out (November 4th) the child welfare service issued emergency care orders for all three children in accordance with section 4-6 of the Child Welfare Act. (You can download a PDF copy of the Child Welfare act here.) They were placed in emergency foster homes the same day. The sad account does not stop there. You can read the details of the case and the court’s decision HERE.
Many in Norway have been hoping and praying for the type of decision made in the Hernehult case. In it, the Norwegian authorities were convicted of wrongfully taking two of the boys into care in the first place. This is an opening salvo of, hopefully, many more decisions like it.
Professor Marianne Haslev Skånland is the one who referred me to Paragraph 68 in the Pedersen case and she was particularly pleased with the decision in the Hernehult case. She writes:
“The judgments have made things increasingly clear, up to now, when they write so clearly that they (the ECtHR judges) both condemn the taking into care of two of the children, AND the failure to return them.”
She also states:
“I am really most of all glad of the judgments from February 2020 which I found against Russia and Romania. Not because I am glad to see that in those countries, too, they have social services which more or less frequently make enemies of parents and seem to delight in disrupting family bonds. But because I see a trend in what the ECtHR is doing: They now seem wide awake to the fact that they have a duty to carry out here: help combat a very destructive trend – the trend of believing that biological parents are of no importance to their children and that the social services can provide children with better conditions and satisfactory ’stimulation’! That is pure, speculative psychobabble – quackery, and all experience disproves it.”
Marianne’s description of Barnevernet philosophies as “speculative psychobabble” fits my understanding perfectly. She has broad knowledge of child welfare services inside and outside of her home country of Norway. HERE, on her homepage, you can see links to the Norwegian cases leading up to and including those mentioned in this post.
With all of the challenges families face in our time, the last concern should be about government entities separating loving families. Many countries are having similar problems. It is important that we become aware of the philosophies of child welfare in all countries.
I appreciate those who have worked so hard to create awareness about this important issue and I congratulate those who have spent years fighting to see that these cases made their way to court.
Chris Reimers
Posted by Chris 
Wings of the Wind 
Families Continue to be Torn Apart by Child Welfare Services in Norway and Elsewhere
December 30, 2025By Marianne Haslev Skånland
I have read Mia Kristensen’s account of the experiences of a family deprived of their children by Scandinavian ‘child protection services’ (CPS), in Norway called Barnevernet. I have for over 30 years now been engaged in trying to assist in some of the work for families hit in this way and I know that what Mia writes is true for so very many, and is the result of a country’s very dysfunctional ‘child protection’.
The stories are most often told by parents or grandparents. The children who are in the hands of the child protection system are usually prevented from writing or saying openly anything that goes against the official version of the story, or they are afraid to speak because if they do, they know they will be isolated even more radically or their parents will be sanctioned against. For example, the rare, allowed meetings children-parents will be cut down on or taken away altogether.
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But in some cases we hear more about the children’s perspective. Here are two stories. I know them to be true.
The first is about a day of celebration which is something like Christmas for Norwegian children: The two children of a family were taken into foster care. In spring came the ‘seventeenth of May’. It is Norwegian Constitution Day and is often called ‘children’s day’, the celebration being concentrated around happy events for children.
The CPS have a principle of preventing reunions on occasions which can make children feel emotional about their family. However, in this case the 9-year-old girl was allowed by the CPS to visit her parents. Her younger brother was not. So the day was a misery for the girl. She did not want to take part in any happy celebration or watch parades, did not want to eat anything (children’s favourite food and ice creams are usually high points for them on ‘syttende mai’). She cried helplessly all day because her brother was not allowed to be with them and because they were not allowed to show that they loved their parents.
The other case has been taken up by Wings before:
Landmark Report Exposes the Realities of Norwegian Child Protection. It concerns the municipality of Samnanger in Norway, which had got a new mayor and a head administrator and several politicians who wanted radical change, standing up against what the CPS had been doing. There was quite a fight in the community, but they managed to commission a realistic and revealing report of three local CPS cases. The report and some newspaper articles let the children have a voice too. One of the cases concerned a family of father and four children, now of age.
One of the boys said: “I didn’t have so many friends at school. Then the CPS also took my family from me.”
The oldest was a girl who had been 17 at the time and had not been taken. But although she had been allowed to remain with her father, she too was hit hard by the destruction of their family life: The CPS took everything I had – and smashed it.
The youngest, a girl, had been only 7 years old when she was separated from her father and all her siblings. Her reaction had been to be desperately frightened, unhappy and upset. The diagnosis of the CPS was, as expected, not to face the fact that this was the result of their actions, but to put her into institutional care and through her childhood and youth have her treated with various drugs, supposedly to calm her down and lessen her ‘abnormality’.
The two lawyers making the report found her, on the contrary, to be normal and to communicate very realistically about the CPS ‘care’. She told them that she had been very afraid all the years in foster home and institutions. – It should take no great imagination on our part to see that she had experienced simply a variant of what prisoners from concentration camps and other places of torture tell us.
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The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg has found the Norwegian state guilty of over 30 violations in 24 CPS cases concentrated around Article 8: the right to private and family life. But the Norwegian authorities have not been willing to return the children even in these cases.
There seem to be fewer takings into care now in 2025 than earlier, but the way the CPS practice ‘protecting’ children is of the same kind as before. Mia Kristensen’s story could be from Norway any time between 1950 (or before that) and today.
One item of ideology is to my mind a dominant factor explaining official intransigence: It is widely believed in our society – and the teaching of this in the education of social workers has not changed – that biological family is of no particular importance to children, that siblings are just playmates for the time being, and parents simply replaceable ‘caregivers’ doing a job of providing a stimulating environment for children who are with them nearly accidentally. Therefore, families who desperately want their children returned home are simply seen as self-serving and vain.
How Norwegian experts came to reject biological kinship as relevant in child welfare policy
There is no understanding in the social work of many Western countries, certainly not in northern Europe, of how deep the natural bonds of love are which bind close relatives together. Or, in a variant formulation: Love is taken to be only a product of success. Only perfect parents and children, who are also completely satisfied with each other and whose lives develop in every way splendidly, are thought to experience mutual love and solidarity, as satisfaction. Hence, such imperfections as poverty and illness are suspect in the eyes of these ‘experts’, cf for instance A Christmas Wish,
and examples e – h here:
The Child Protection Service (CPS) – unfortunately the cause of grievous harm
Part 2: Content, dimensions, causes and mechanisms of CPS activities
This belief in the cause of a feeling of belonging and trust is age-old and is found in many societies. In the USA there was a wave of this ideology about 25 years ago:
Hillary and Bill Clinton – zealous promoters of forced adoptions in the USA
(Section 3 of the article traces it, in a very short sketch, back more than 2000 years.)
I know there have been cases where U.S. authorities have separated children from parents when arresting them as unwanted immigrants. But there have also been loud protests against it.
I recently came across three videos in connection with disregard of children’s needs of their family and of the home or country they feel is their own. The videos stem from a Senate Hearing in Washington DC on 3 December of this year. The hearing concerns proposed legislation about one particular tragic action of Russia in the present war: abduction and down-right enslaving of Ukrainian children. The Hearing was bipartisan and with representatives of the House invited as well:
–Breaking news: Senate holds critical hearing on Russia war crimes against Ukrainian children | AC14
–U.S. SENATE HEARING: Ukrainian Ambassador Exposes Russia’s Child Abductions | DRM News | AC1F
–Lindsey Graham Asks Ukraine Ambassador If Russia Has Admitted To Abducting Children In Occupied Land
What is shown in the videos is glass clear and I very much hope that this initiative in the U.S. Senate will carry over to a clearer understanding that not everything we do to the children of our own societies is in ‘the best interest of the child’ either.
In Europe too the emphasis has become very clear that the return of Ukrainian children to their own country, and to their own families if they are alive, is the top priority in a peace settlement, and that the abduction of them is a very serious war crime.
Norwegian society is generally more placidly subservient and admiring of our own authorities than I think Americans are, so ideology without a solid, factual basis is even more difficult to see through in Norway. I do not see what we can do but continue to try and find out about it and document it as well as we can, and continue to spread information about it – in the true best interest of the child.
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Marianne Haslev Skånland has worked as a professor of linguistics at the University of Bergen, and is now retired. She has worked on analysis and criticism of science, both generally and in areas of linguistics, psychology and child protection, and was a member of the scientific advisory board of Stiftelsen för rättspsykologi (The Foundation for Forensic Psychology) in Stockholm. She has functioned as an expert witness in child protection cases before a District Court, an Appeal Court and a County Committee, altogether five times in Norway, and once before Länsrätten in Sweden.
She is engaged in social questions concerning human rights and health, and specially interested in the question of the scientific basis of the views of social services and the justice system concerning psychology and social life. She has lectured for many years on the position and influence of behaviorism and other schools of thought in linguistics and anthropology.
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