A local court in Berlin granted custody of a two-year-old Indian girl to the German state due to the child's repeated and severe physical abuse by either parent or both, which resulted in a skull fracture when the child was three months old and a penetrative injury to the genital area when she was seven months old. The child was caught in a legal dispute between German child welfare authorities and her parents.
Her parents, who have been seeking the intervention of Indian authorities for her repatriation to India, now plan to appeal against the order in Germany. The Pankow local court states in its order that “it is convinced that the best interests of the child are at risk” and has rejected the parents’ contentions filed in detail about the sequence of events claiming that both injuries caused in the April and September of 2021 were accidental.
As things stand, the court has granted the temporary guardianship of the child to Youth Welfare Office in Berlin. The parents have been “deprived of their right to parental care of the child to avert to existing danger to the child” and the applications of the mother and father for the surrender of the child and transfer to a third party in India have been rejected. However, the court has currently granted the biological parents two one-hour visits every month. The parents, an Indian couple who have been residing in Berlin since 2018, were in Delhi trying to get government authorities to step in once more, they claimed. They claimed to have visited with officials from the ministry of external affairs and asked them to do so.
