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).

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.

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