Yasmine and Sara Pourhashemi
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Yasmine Pourhashemi and Sara Pourhashemi are two Iranian–Belgian sisters of Iranian descent who, as a result of a child custody dispute, lived for over half a year in the Belgian embassy in Tehran, causing a long diplomatic dispute between Belgium and Iran.
The girls, aged 14 and 6 at the time, lived with their divorced mother, and were taken on a holiday to Greece by their father in August 2003. From Greece, he forced them to go with him to Iran. In December the sisters managed to escape from their father's apartment and found refuge in the Belgian embassy.
Because the family members hold dual nationality, this led to a complex legal debate. Under Belgian law the father of the girls had signed away custody rights after his divorce from their mother. The country issued an international arrest warrant against him on the charge of kidnapping. According to Iranian law, which does not recognize double nationality and usually favors men in custody cases, the girls were Iranians and should be with their father.
Belgium's minister of foreign affairs Louis Michel travelled to Iran in March 2004 to find a solution but without success. Only after a visit in May 2004 by the Iranian minister of foreign affairs Kamal Kharrazi to Belgium, where he met Michel and Belgian prime minister Guy Verhofstadt, were the girls allowed to return to their mother.
[edit] See also
- Foreign relations of the Netherlands#International issues - similar case
