A bitter three-year custody battle has moved to the Bermuda Supreme Court, and the fate of a seven-year-old Canadian child now rests in the hands of Puisne Judge Vincent Meerabux, who has issued an order prohibiting the father from removing her from the Island, The Royal Gazette has learned.

The move follows developments in the Ontario General Court, which recently reversed an August 1996 decision granting custody to Toronto area doctor Peter MacLellan and awarded custody to the mother, Dr. Marguerite Kopaniak.

MacLellan, meanwhile, has been cited for contempt of court in Ontario and now faces arrest should he ever return to Canada.

MacLellan ran afoul of the Ontario court when he moved to Bermuda with the child in late October 1996, following a marriage to his Bermudian-born attorney, who was practising in Toronto at the time. He only informed the mother and the court of the move once it became a fait accompli.

His actions effectively denied the mother court-ordered access to the child and broke commitments undertaken by MacLellan to stay in the Toronto area and undergo family counselling with a court-appointed child psychologist, the Ontario Court's Madam Justice Janet Wilson ruled.

Meanwhile MacLellan, within days of arriving on Bermuda, obtained an ex parte child custody order from Mr. Justice Meerabux prohibiting the mother or her agents from removing the child from the Island without Court permission; the mother has since arrived on the Island seeking to overturn that order.

In a related development, Home Affairs Minister Quinton Edness has vowed to look into Bermuda's exclusion from an international convention on child kidnapping which was signed by the UK and ratified by nearly all of the Island's major trading partners in 1988.

The Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction was framed to secure the prompt return of children who have been wrongfully removed from their home jurisdiction, said attorney Keren Lomas. It also grants non-custodial parents the right to refuse having a child removed to another country.

"I can't tell you why (we haven't heard of this), but we're certainly going to look into whether we can bring the Hague Convention to Bermuda,'' Mr.

Edness recently told The Royal Gazette . "From my perspective this is something we would want.'' Mr. Edness said he would be consulting with the Minister of Health and Social Services Clarence Terceira and Attorney General Elliott Mottley to see how the convention's provisions could be extended here.

The convention was first signed in 1980 and by 1988 Australia, Canada, France, Portugal, the US, the UK, Switzerland, and Spain had all joined. Since then Austria, Norway, Mexico, New Zealand, Germany, and Denmark among others, have followed suit.

Bermuda's failure to ratify the convention came to light during this recent custody battle. Under the Hague Convention the rights of custody and access under the law of one contracting state are effectively respected in another contracting state, said Ms Lomas.

And Bermuda, she added, does not need to invite the United Kingdom to extend the Convention here. The Island can by its own legislative authority give statutory effect to this or any other Hague Convention.

"It stands to reason that a common set of principles is applying throughout much of Europe, the Americas, and Australasia.'' The question was to what extent does Bermuda wish to adhere to the principles of the Convention despite the fact that the United Kingdom had not extended its effect here, she said.

"At a time when Bermuda is trying to promote itself as an international arbitration site, it would appear appropriate for Bermuda to show a willingness to adhere to the international principles so widely accepted,'' she added.

"Hague conventions don't grow on trees,'' agreed Dr. Kopaniak's Toronto-based lawyer Mr. John Legge.

One of the purposes of the Convention, he said, is to make it harder for someone to seek justice in another court should they not agree with a particular ruling of their home state, a practice called "jurisdiction shopping''.