Thousands of protesters demonstrated in front of Norwegian embassies across USA, including Washington DC on Friday, asking the Norwegian government to return the five children to their parents. The children were taken in custody by the child services on allegations that the parents "occasionally slapped" their kids, and indoctrinated them with Christian faith.
Protests are expected to be staged in 24 countries on 8th and 9th January, which include Slovakia, Ireland, India, Poland, Russia, Canada, and Romania.
The child welfare services or Barnevernet has even started the process of adoption of Ruth and Marius Bodnariu's three sons and two daughters.
The children were seized last November from Marius, who is a Romanian citizen and an IT engineer working in Norway, and Ruth, a Norwegian.
Trouble for the Romanian Pentecostal family started when one of their daughters told her teacher about their parents' belief that "God punishes sin."
The case of the daughters, 9-year-old Eliana and 7-year-old Naomi, reached their principal, who called up the Barnevernet, telling them also that the children were also disciplined by "occasional" slaps.
Slapping a child is treated similar as physical abuse in Norway, while Bodnariu terms it as a "light punishment." Supporters who know the Bodnarius say that government's assertion that the children were physically abusive is unproven.
"Lately they are trying to characterize it as an abuse case. It never started as such. The teacher said that we need to bridge the gap between us and this family because they have radical Christian principles and we know that right now, everything that was considered decent two decades ago is considered 'radical,'" Pastor Christian Ionescu of Elim Romanian Pentecostal Church in Chicago told the Christian Post.
"You cannot indoctrinate your children in one religion and you cannot tell them about God and the attributes of God because that is offensive to so many people. Then it developed as an abuse case once Barnevernet understood that you cannot go against the family based on religious accusations of indoctrination," Ionescu added.
Bodnariu said that the school and the child services thought that the parents were "very Christian," which "creates a disability in children."
The children have been put in separate homes, and have limited visitation rights, wherein the parents can visit their four-month-old infant son twice a week, and two other sons, 5-year-old Matthew and 2-year-old John, only once a week. They are not permitted to even see their daughters.
"Barnevernet is going ahead with the process of adoption because they say that such a long time has passed and now it is going to be traumatic for the children to be returned to their parents," said Ionescu.
Bodnariu said that Barnevernet first wants to "take away the parents' rights" in a "fylkesnemdna," (county council hearing) for which the date has not been decided yet.
The couple will challenge Barnevernet in the Superior Court of Norway, even as their online petition has received over 50,000 signatures.
Ionescu noted that the Barnevernet cannot begin the adoption process without the case being heard by the court.
"It's unclear and they use very vague language [about what beginning the adoption procedure means,] but it is absolutely incomprehensible to seek more information about the family and to assess them some more but in the meantime go ahead with the adoption process. They cannot, usually in the United States and in many countries, you cannot start the process for adoption until the last decision of the judiciary, of the courts, has been made. They are going parallel with that," he said.
The child services did not reportedly evaluate the parents before taking the decision to separate the children from family. A month after Barnevernet had removed the children from their homes, they said they want to evaluate Ruth and Marius, but the evaluation has been deferred till February.
Barnevernet has a record of seizing children from families because of slightest of issues, most notably from families of immigrants where one or both parents is a foreigner.
As many as 40 percent of all the children in the custody of Barnevernet belong to non-Norwegian families, according to NewsinEnglish, an online magazine.
Norwegian human rights lawyer and activist Marius Reikeras said that an estimated 70,000 children are in Barnevernet custody, and that the government has been proven guilty four times by European Court of Human Rights, for violating due process of fair trial.
