Are there different concerns depending on the location that the children are traveling to?
Yes. If a child is traveling for example to the United States, UK, Australia, New Zealand, these are all countries that are members of the Hague convention. Their courts would react quickly to an abduction, so that a wrongfully removed child is returned relatively quickly.
There are also countries that are members of the Hague convention, that are referred to as “non-compliant.” Examples of such countries would be Mexico, Brazil, Turkey and Bulgaria. What that means is that they do not process abduction cases promptly and the time it takes to process a case can be prohibitive.
The US state department publishes an annual report to congress on the operation of the Hague convention and identifies the countries the us has had positive and negative experiences with.
The next category would be a non Hague country. In such a case we have no treaty obligations between Canada and such a country. Examples would be Lebanon, Syria, Bangladesh, mainland China, India and others. In such cases it becomes a very complex process to recover a child that has been abducted to such a country. While recovery is possible, it requires “thinking outside the box.”
According to UK based reunite international child abduction centre, in 2012, out of 500 international abduction cases, of those that were hague cases 92% were resolved, but with non-Hague cases it drops down to 65.5%.