Catherine Meyer

Catherine Irene Jacqueline Meyer, Lady Meyer, CBE (born 26 January 1953) is the wife of Sir Christopher Meyer, the former British Ambassador to the United States. She is the founder and chief executive of the charity Parents & Abducted Children Together (PACT).

Biography

Meyer's Handbook on the Mechanism of the London Metal Exchange Option Market was published in 1982. In 1983 she registered as a stockbroker. In 1985 she moved to Germany with her German husband, by whom she had two sons. Despite her having custody of the children after the divorce, their father refused to return them to London after a summer holiday visit in 1994. This led to her almost decade-long legal battle in the German and English courts to gain access to her sons. It was not until 2003 that she was able to see them again. Her account of these events is found in her two books, Two Children behind a Wall and They Are My Children Too. There is also an account in DC Confidential, the memoirs of her 2nd husband, Christopher Meyer.

In October 1997, she married Christopher Meyer on the eve of his departure to Washington to become British Ambassador to the United States. During their five and a half years in America, she campaigned against international parental child abduction alongside a number of American parents in a similar situation with Germany.

In 1998, she was involved in the launch of the International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children (ICMEC), launched by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), and subsequently becoming CEO of ICMEC/Europe. In 2000 she created Parents & Abducted Children Together (PACT), affiliated to NCMEC and ICMEC.

During her time in Washington D.C., Meyer co-chaired with Ernie Allen two international conferences on improving the effectiveness of the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction and gave evidence to committees of the United States House of Representatives and the US Senate which led to several concurrent resolutions urging better compliance by certain signatory states, including Germany, with the Hague Convention 1996; and persuaded both Presidents Clinton and Bush to raise with the German Chancellor cases of parental child abduction to Germany, including her own.

She has also taken her campaign against international parental child abduction to Europe, giving evidence before the Belgian Senate.; successfully lobbying the EU to tighten its rules against parental child abduction; and, together with ICMEC, persuading the Permanent Bureau of the Hague Convention to produce a good practice guide to the implementation of the Convention.

In the UK, Meyer instigated adjournment debates in the House of Commons on her case and the issue of parental child abduction in general across frontiers. In 2005, the Parliamentary Ombudsman upheld her complaint of maladministration against the then Lord Chancellor's Department with regard to the handling of her case.

Since 2003 and her return to the UK from America, she has broadened PACT's mission to embrace children who go missing for any reason. This has led to close cooperation with the Home Office, the police, CEOP and other charities. She is a member of the Home Secretary's Strategic Oversight Group on missing people, created in 2006 by David Blunkett. Her campaigns have focussed on the difficulties of measuring exactly how many children go missing every year; the adoption by police forces of the Missingkids Website; and the Child Rescue Alert. On 25 May 2011, International Missing Children's Day, the Home Office announced major changes to child protection services in the UK, in particular the passing of responsibility for missing, abducted and exploited children to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection agency (CEOP). This was the culmination of a ten-year lobbying campaign. Meyer's role was recognised in the Home Office press release.

In 2003, Meyer was co-chair of Vote 2004, which campaigned for a referendum on the still-born European Constitution. She is a National Treasurer of the Conservative Party.

From 2003 to 2007 she was a non-executive director of LIFFE (London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange).

From 2013 to 2014 she was a trustee of the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences.

In 1999, Meyer received the Adam Walsh Rainbow Award for outstanding contribution to children's causes and was named by British Airways Business Life magazine for her campaigning on behalf of abducted children. In 2009 and 2010 PACT successfully passed rigorous inspection and audit by, respectively, the City Bridge Trust and the financial services company ICAP to qualify for major donations.

During her time in Washington, Meyer was entrusted with the last major redecoration of the Ambassador's residence, a building designed by the eminent British architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, and built in the 1920s. Under her guidance the reception rooms were redecorated, the bedrooms redesigned and the bathrooms modernised.

Meyer was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2012 Birthday Honours for services to children and families.

Books

• Catherine Laylle (1997), Two Children Behind a Wall, Arrow Books Ltd. (ISBN 0-099-25504-9)
• Catherine Meyer (1999), These are My Children, Too, PublicAffairs,U.S. (ISBN 1-891-62015-0)