Story in the Globe today about a French woman who was charged with abduction of two of her children in BC. She's also running for president of France:
quote:
Detours in the long and winding road to a PhD are not unknown.But few can measure up to what befell Nathalie Gettliffe this spring, as she journeyed all the way from her native France to defend her doctoral thesis at the University of British Columbia.
Instead of appearing before an elite academic panel, she found herself arrested at the Vancouver airport and thrown in prison.
While her professors wondered why she hadn't shown up, Ms. Gettliffe was being charged with two long-standing counts of child abduction.
The charges were laid after she fled five years ago to France with two children from a broken marriage, in defiance of a B.C. court order. Since then, her case has become even more bizarre. Behind prison walls, where she remains to this day, Ms. Gettliffe has not only managed to complete her thesis defence, but also give birth to a baby boy.
In the meantime, she has become a cause célèbre in France, the subject of numerous media reports pillorying Canada for its treatment of a pregnant woman and turning B.C. into a land of "terrorist justice" in the eyes of her many fervid French supporters.
Adding fuel to the frenzy, Ms. Gettliffe has announced her intention to run for the presidency of France in 2007. ...
Ms. Gettliffe's guilty plea is unlikely to diminish the fierce emotions her case has generated in France.
There, she has been characterized with great sympathy in the media as a brave mother seeking to protect her children -- Joséphine, 12, and Maximilien, 11 -- from an alleged cult-like church attended by the children's father, Scott Grant.
The Vancouver Church of Christ has links to the U.S.-based International Church of Christ, banned from many U.S. university campuses for cult-like recruiting drives.
At the same time, prison conditions in B.C. have been characterized as "worse than Guantanamo" by Ms. Gettliffe's current husband, Francis Gruzelle, who appears regularly on French TV to plead his wife's case.
The couple say they are writing a book called The Hell of Canadian Prisons. ...
Earlier, arrangements were also made to enable the imprisoned woman to give the required oral defence of her PhD thesis that had been so abruptly cancelled by her arrest.
Ms. Gettliffe's six-member academic committee agreed to conduct the hearing at the Alouette prison, a first for the university, according to Sherrill Grace, who chaired the unusual proceedings.
The "5janvier2007" site linked to in my first post is now down, but the story I linked to is still available. Does anyone know if there's been further reportage on the identity of "Catherine di Medici"?
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posted 21 October 2005 01:00 AM
