Girl in custody battle back in France with father

This is a follow-up to a piece that first appeared here last month.

You might remember the story of Elise, the three-and-a-half-year-old girl who was abducted in the southern French city of Arles on March 20.

Her father, Jean-Michel André, was left badly beaten, an alerte de l'enlèvement (the equivalent of an amber alert) raised and French police put out a nation-wide search, which was later extended throughout the whole of Europe for the girl and her Russian-born mother, Irina Belenkaya

On Sunday Elise was found safe and sound in Hungary, close to the border with the Ukraine.

Police there detained the mother and Elise was reunited with her father on Monday, with Victor Gioia, the lawyer for André confirming that his client had flown to Hungary to collect his daughter and said that the goal now was "to try to avoid yet another trauma in the girl's life."

Elise has been abducted three times since the couple split in 2007.

"The father's intention was not to start another battle with the girl's mother, but to find a solution that would allow their daughter to have a more-or-less normal life," Gioia told French media.

He also added that his client would not be pressing charges against Belenkaya who is due to appear before a court in the Hungarian capital, Budapest, on Wednesday.

And on Tuesday afternoon André and Elise arrived back in France.

While the story seems to have had a happy end - at least as far as the father and French law are concerned - it still leaves a lot of issues unresolved.

The case remains particularly complex because both parents have been awarded individual custody of Elise by courts in their respective countries.

Similarly both are liable to prosecution for abduction in one another's countries; Belenkaya in France and André in Russia.

According to the national daily, Le Figaro, the French authorities will be getting in touch with their Russian counterparts in the coming days to "try to find a solution for the family that is in the best interests of the child."

For its part Russia says although it judged Elise's return to her father to have been "premature" it has proposed to France that the two countries try to co-operate to find a solution to the dispute between not just the two parents but also the two countries' legal differences.

"We have a case which is very complicated from the judicial perspective," said Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov on Tuesday.

"That's why we want to propose to France that experts from both sides undertake a concrete consultation process."