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Results from the Project

The implementation of the iCare project will ensure short-term, mid-term and long-term results. In the short-term, the project will improve the knowledge on the ways different national legal and administrative frameworks deal with cases of international child abduction, it will raise awareness on the usage of IFM as complementary to judicial proceedings, and it will further deliver clarity on the application of the different relevant EU instruments. In the mid-term, iCare will increase the capacity of the concerned stakeholders- Central Authorities, legal practitioners and family mediators to address issues related to judicial cooperation in International child abduction cases through facilitating the consolidation of a multistakeholder community for the collection and exchange of good practices and peer learning on national and European levels, thus achieving the intangible result. In the long-term, the project will improve the overall cooperation between the stakeholders when handling cases of international child abduction and it will mainstream IFM as a viable method to be frequently applied during the judicial process thus improving the situation of children in international child abduction cases.

All external factors and possible scenarios will be taken into consideration in order to ensure that its results will be achieved. These results will go beyond the scope of the Consortium countries as participants, part of their wider professional network outside the partnership, will contribute to the completion of the WP2 Questionnaires on Stakeholder Requirements and the Recommendations List in order to gather as wide of a feedback as possible to best address the needs of EU Member States in regard to incorporation of IFM in the judicial process in general. The project’s scope will further be expanded by an active virtual presence through the e-Platform and the AI Chatbot. The ePlatform will provide a virtual forum for the collection of good practices and better cooperation, and it will maintain the function to host virtual events that can reach a significant number of project stakeholders and other interested parties. The AI Chatbot, which is one of the tangible results, will prove an invaluable tool for improving the knowledge and awareness of parents in regards to IFM, as it will serve as a source of consistently up-to date information through its self-learning functionality on the basis of initially integrated information.

The main tangible result of the iCare project will be the iCare Methodology which will serve as a detailed step-by-step Guide to Central Authorities, legal practitioners and family mediators on how to best utilise International Family Mediation in order to improve the situation of the child in international child abduction judicial proceedings and will establish minimum common EU methods to this end. The iCare project consortium will draw conclusions from past projects funded under the same stream. This also includes the project ICLUDE which was led by Missing Children Europe. All partners will analise carefully what are the outputs from those projects and implemented them into the envisaged activities in order to achieve better results and wider reachability without any duplication.