Court clarifies quasi-settlement defence to removed child’s return (L-S (a child))

Family analysis: Katy Chokowry barrister at 1 King’s Bench Walk examines the Court of Appeal’s approach in L-S (a child) to a child’s habitual residence a parent’s acquiescence in the child’s removal and the intolerability of the child’s position if returned after settling in new country.

Original news

In L-S (a child) [2017] EWCA Civ 2177 the Court of Appeal allowed a mother’s appeal against a court order to return her son from England to the US under the Hague Convention on the Civil International Aspects of Child Abduction 1980 (Hague Convention 1980). The Court of Appeal held that while the judge at first instance had been entitled to conclude that the child had not been habitually resident in England and his return to the US would not place him in an intolerable situation the father was to be taken to have acquiesced in the child’s wrongful removal to England because he had unequivocally accepted that the child would remain with the mother in England and it would be unjust to permit him to resile. In view of its conclusion on acquiescence the Court of Appeal decided to exercise its discretion against making an order for...

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