User:Holbornesque/Catherine Meyer

Lady (Catherine) Meyer is the wife of Sir Christopher Meyer, the former British Ambassador to the United States. Born on 26 January 1953 of a Russian mother and French father, she has lived in Britain since the age of 12 and carries both British and French passports. She is founder and chief executive of the international children’s charity PACT (Parents and Abducted Children Together) ; and campaigns actively on behalf of missing and abducted children in the United Kingdom and abroad.

Lady Meyer, who was educated at the French Lycée in London and took her degree at the London School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies (SEES), began her career in financial services, working in the 1970s and 80s at Merrill Lynch, Dean Witter and E.F.Hutton. In 1979 she became one of the first women to be licensed as a commodity broker and was a top producer for E.F. Hutton; and in 1982 she published a handbook on commodity options on the London Metal Exchange. In 1983 she also registered as a stockbroker.

In 1985 Lady Meyer abandoned her career and moved to Germany with her German husband, by whom she had two children. After the break-up of their marriage, she returned to London with her children and went back to financial services with the Sanpaolo Bank. Her life then took another sharp turn, when, following a summer visit to their father in 1994, he failed to return them to London. Despite an English court order in her favour, and strenuous efforts in the German courts, for the better part of a decade she was denied access to her children, who remained in Germany. Lady Meyer’s account of these events are to be found in her two books: Two Children behind A Wall and They Are My Children Too. There is also an account of her struggle to see her children in DC Confidential, the memoirs of her husband, Sir Christopher Meyer.

In 1997, on the eve of their departure for Washington, she married Sir Christopher Meyer, who had been appointed British Ambassador to the United States. During their five-and-a-half years in America, Lady Meyer put to use her own personal experience, waging a campaign against international parental child abduction in company with American parents in a similar situation. This led to a number of notable achievements. In 1999 she co-founded the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children (ICMEC), the international arm of the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) , subsequently becoming CEO of ICMEC/Europe. In 2000, she created her own charity, PACT, affiliated to ICMEC.

During her time in Washington, Lady Meyer co-chaired two international conferences to discuss ways of remedying the main weaknesses in the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction ; gave evidence to committees of the US Congress and the US Senate, which led to several con-current resolutions urging better compliance by certain signatory states, including Germany, with the Hague Convention ; and persuaded both Presidents Clinton and Bush to raise with the German Chancellor cases of parental child abduction to Germany, including her own.

Lady Meyer has also taken her campaign against international parental child abduction to Europe: giving evidence to the Belgian Senate ; successfully lobbying the EU to tighten up its rules on parental child abduction ; and persuading the Permanent Bureau of the Hague Convention to agree to produce a good practice guide on the implementation of the Convention

In Britain she instigated a number of adjournment debates in the House of Commons on her case and the issue of parental child abduction in general ; and in 2005 the Parliamentary Ombudsman upheld her complaint against the then Lord Chancellor’s Department for maladministration in the matter of her case.

Since returning to the UK from Washington, Lady Meyer has broadened PACT’s remit to include children who go missing for whatever reason. This has taken the form of close collaboration with the police, Home Office and other NGOs to improve data collection on how many children go missing and why; the development of the MissingKids website ; a poster campaign to find missing children ; the propagation among all UK police forces of the Child Rescue Alert system ; and membership of the Home Secretary’s Strategic Oversight Group on missing people, created in 2006. Under her editorship, PACT has produced a series of reports, highlighting these issues. The focus of PACT’s campaigning today is to improve the way in which services on behalf of missing and abducted children are organised, with special emphasis on the importance of treating children separately from adults.

Lady Meyer is active in politics. In 2003 she became co-chair of “Vote 2004” which campaigned for a referendum on the still-born European Constitution. In 2004 she stood unsuccessfully to replace Michael Portillo as Conservative candidate for Kensington and Chelsea.

From 2003 to 2007 she was a non-executive director of LIFFE (London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange).

In 1999 she received the Adam Walsh Rainbow Award for outstanding contribution to children’s causes and was named by British Airways Business Life Magazine as one of the people who will be remembered in the millennium for her campaigning on behalf of abducted children