By Tim Padgett
TIME

It's hard to watch the judicial farce playing out in Brazil right now and not remember the one that began during the holiday season here in Miami 10 years ago. Brazil's Supreme Court on Thursday halted the return of nine-year-old Sean Goldman to his American father — even though international law clearly dictated that the boy should have been handed over when his mother, who had absconded to South America with the child five years ago, died last year. It sounds a lot like the case of Elián González, the six-year-old Cuban boy who, after washing up in Florida in 1999 after a boat disaster his mother did not survive, was for seven months kept from his father in Cuba by a string of outrageous and politically motivated U.S. court rulings.

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