What do you do if your spouse has kidnapped your child and fled the country? Sadly this has happened so many times that there is an international agreement in place to help. Fortunately South Africa is one of the signatories to “The Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction” .
The main intention of the Hague convention is that children should be returned to the country they would normally live in as long as it is safe for them to do so. Depending on the country your attorney can start legal proceedings up to a year after the abduction but in practise you want this to happen as soon as possible because one of the more common defences I’ve seen is to argue that the child has been in the new country for so long that they are now settled and repatriating them would be harmful to the child. In cases where I’ve represented the “left behind” parent we have managed to successfully argue against it, but there is never any guarantee.
I really recommend using an expert for this because it requires coordinating attorneys in both countries and the matters can get very technical and law requires the judge to act “expeditiously”. In other words any court action is very quick and chances of a successful appeal for the losing party are usually limited.