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- The mother was of the Satmar tradition, the father Modern Orthodox. The father sought an order for the children to live with both parents and stay with him every Sunday night. The mother applied to prevent the father issuing further applications for a period of at least three years. HHJ Rowe QC concluded that the children should live with both parents: "There should not remain in place an order that might be taken to imply that the mother is more important than the father in the children’s lives." The children would spend alternate Sabbath weekends and key festival days with their father: removing the children from his religious life would cause profound damage to their relationship. The mother's application was refused. The exclusion of the father from the children's education continued to be a concern, and it would be contrary to the children's best interests to limit his ability to seek the assistance of the court. Judgment, 25/02/2020, free
- The parents had split up and the boy was living with his mother. The father had applied for a child arrangements order. This was a fact-finding hearing with regard to allegations which, according to HHJ Tolson QC, would not "in the ordinary course, have had very much to say for the future" in terms of the boy's welfare. These included allegations of coercive control and that the father had raped the mother. The judge said that "the enquiry into this allegation of rape is fraught with difficulty" and that he did "not see why the mother could not, should not, have made life difficult for the father" during the events, while also noting that the mother would "often tell the father to stop". The judge's findings were that the sex was consensual, and more generally that the father was not coercively controlling. This decision was successfully appealed in JH v MF [2020] EWHC 86 (Fam), where Russell J DBE stated that the judge had employed "obsolescent concepts concerning the issue of consent". Judgment, 24/02/2020, free
- An application for the summary return to Zambia of two children of British nationality, brought to England by their South African mother. Zambia had signed the Hague Convention on the civil aspects of international child abduction, but had not been accepted by the United Kingdom as a reciprocating party, and so this was instead decided under the inherent jurisdiction of the High Court. Before the abduction, one child had made allegations of sexual abuse against the father, but unsupervised overnight contact had been required to continue. With this in mind, Holman J was not satisfied that returning the children to Zambia was in their best interests, not without much fuller inquiry and fact finding. The mother had stated that she would not return to Zambia, and the court could not risk the potentially disastrous outcome of the children being returned to an unprotected situation without her. The application was dismissed. Judgment, 12/02/2020, free
- The children had repeatedly told their guardian, and through her the court, that they wanted to continue living with their mother in England. The Spanish court had ordered that they live with their father in Spain. Russell J DBE found that on any objective and neutral analysis both children were habitually resident in England. They were settled here and were fully integrated into their schools and social environment. There was no significant evidence contrary to such a finding, and jurisdiction was with and in this court. The mother's appeal against enforcement of the Spanish order was allowed. The children would live with her, and would have contact with the father, subject to him providing written permission for the renewal of the children's passports, and documentary evidence that the Spanish order had been discharged and all criminal complaints in Spain against the mother had been dropped. Judgment, 06/02/2020, free
- An application by the father pursuant to the Hague Convention 1980. The child was born in Brazil but the family had subsequently moved to England. The parents had been on an extended visit to Brazil when the mother left with the child, first to the USA and then returning to the UK. The father argued that the child was habitually resident in Brazil and that this was a wrongful removal. Judd J held that, while the family had not yet decided where they would live in the long term, the mother and child were habitually resident in England. Given the mother's long-standing residence in the UK and the plans that she and the father had made, she did not lose her habitual residence during that trip to Brazil. Though the father no doubt felt wrong-footed and insecure when the mother left, the plan to return to England had not changed and he had not revoked his consent to that. The father's applications were dismissed. Judgment, 04/02/2020, free
- The former wife sought a Hadkinson order barring the husband from proceeding with an appeal in Family Law Act proceedings unless he made good the default in his payments of child maintenance. Cohen J noted that this might be the first time the Hadkinson principle was extended to cover proceedings which were related but not identical. However, the remedy could be extended to this situation, and the husband's appeal in the related matter would be struck out unless he paid the maintenance due. Judgment, 27/01/2020, free
- The father appealed against the registration of an order made in Poland, which had required him to pay £300 a month maintenance. He had paid this amount up until the CMS had made a new determination. An application to enforce the original order had been made to the Polish courts, who declined jurisdiction. HHJ Moradifar found that by 2012 jurisdiction in relation to the child maintenance was in England and thus the CMS was the competent authority. The father's application against registration of the Polish order was allowed. Judgment, 27/01/2020, free
- An appeal against findings of fact at a hearing concerning complaints of domestic abuse and sexual assault. Russell J DBE found that there had been serious procedural irregularities at the hearing, such as ordering that the appellant gave evidence from counsel's row rather than behind a witness box. She also found that the judge's approach to fact-finding was so flawed as to lead to the conclusion that it was unsafe and wrong. He had failed to take into account relevant material as to the parties' relationship, including reports of aggressive, criminal and violent behaviour on the respondent's part. She held that the resulting judgment was flawed for a multiplicity of reasons, including that the judge failed to consider that the respondent's anxious presentation might be the result of previous abuse by the respondent. Other comments by the judge reflected a failure to consider or appreciate the reality of domestic abuse, control and coercion. The judge had concluded that sexually threatening texts were consistent with "sexting", though this had not been the respondent's case and was not put to the appellant. The judge's approach to the issue of consent, relying on his view that the appellant had not physically fought off the respondent, was "manifestly at odds with current jurisprudence, concomitant sexual behaviour, and what is currently acceptable socio-sexual conduct". It could not be lawful or jurisprudentially apposite for the Family Court to take an approach so much at odds from that which applies in the criminal jurisdiction. The case was remitted for retrial, and a formal request would be made for those judges who might hear cases involving allegations of serious sexual assault in family proceedings to be given training based on that provided to criminal judges. Judgment, 23/01/2020, free
- The mother requested permission to take her nine-year-old son on holiday to Brazil. The boy was living with the father in England, while the mother had previously made and then withdrawn a wrongful removal claim under the 1980 Hague Convention. Roberts J accepted the mother's evidence that she intended to ensure the child's safe return at the end of any stay in Brazil. The risk was that she would change her mind once the boy was there or be persuaded by her family not to return him. On balance, Roberts J was persuaded that the potential benefits to the child of spending time with his mother in Brazil outweighed the potential risks of a wrongful retention, provided that certain protections, including mirror orders, were in place before the visit. Judgment, 14/01/2020, free
- A circuit judge sitting in the Family Court had held that the father, on a single occasion, had sexually abused his daughter. Holman J found that the judge's findings, in a very difficult case, were unreliable. He identified ten issues with them, including that no independent expert view had been brought to bear upon the forensic evidence. Justice, not only to the father but above all to the child, required that the whole matter be reconsidered afresh by a completely different judge. The very young age of the child made this an exceptional case and so the re-hearing would take place before a High Court judge. Judgment, 14/01/2020, free