A teenager taken from her home and parents by German police officers and institionalized in a psychiatric ward for homeschooling is pleading with the international community for help so she can return home.

“I want to ask you for help, to get my right to go back to my family, as I wish,” Melissa Busekros wrote in an English letter hand-delivered to the International Human Rights Group, whose lawyers have been working on her case.

More than six weeks ago she was taken “with more than 15 police men” from her home to a psychiatric hospital in Nuremberg, she wrote, and about a month she was placed in a foster home.

“I am not sick as the doctor said and my family is the best place for me to live,” she said her letter.

Melissa Busekros and her sister speak with Richard Guenther, director of European operations for the International Human Rights Group. The girls are in a clearing house where Melissa was scheduled to meet her parents

WND reported earlier this week a German appeals court affirmed the lower court’s decision to remove the 15-year-old from her home and keep her in foster care, despite a lower court’s proposal accepted by the parents for her to return home under state supervision.

Part of the appeals court ruling included a requirement for her parents, Hubert and Gudrun Busekros, to also be given state-sponsored psychiatric tests, and Joel Thornton, president of the IHRG said there was a high concern that the government will use those tests to remove the other five children from the family.

There also is the fear “Melissa will be returned to the psychiatric clinic system in Germany and ‘disappear.’ This would leave the family with no way to know where Melissa is or how she is doing. She could become a ward of the state and completely lost to her family,” Thornton said.

“The trouble is this emboldens the state again, only now it’s at a higher level, and the courts still are agreeing with them. This could put Melissa back into the psychiatric system where she could disappear from sight entirely,” Thornton told WND.

The appeals court ruling came despite the fact that all three of the lawyers representing Melissa told the higher court the family had accepted a compromise offered by a lower court for her to return home under government supervision.

“In spite of [that] … the appeals court held that the family refused the court’s initial compromise to let Melissa become an outpatient,” Thornton said.

Thornton also suggested that the case even could end up extending its impact beyond the Busekros family.

“There is an increased fear among homeschoolers about whether their children are next,” he said.

Even those German families who already have fled to other countries because of Germany’s homeschool ban are moving into hiding because of the possibility they could be returned to face German fines or jail time for homeschooling, he said. […]

http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=54695

The most sickening and appalling treatment imaginable.

The article in Spigel is frankly, a bad example of doublethink, summed up nicely in this comment to it:

So, you on the one hand, repeat the bogus claim that the German authorities deny this is an attack on home schooling, and in the same breath say that other families have fled Germany to Austria over home schooling and that it is in fact BANNED in Germany.

Now the Germans in exile are running for their lives. They have to do this because with the EU arrest warrant, the immoral German authorities can nab the home schoolers anywhere in the EU, even if they are not violating local laws.

Think about that for a minute.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 15th, 2007 at 11:11 am and is filed under Home Schooling, People.