The court may impose detailed conditions on the form of indirect contact. His Lordship set out the relevant principles: ‘1 Overriding all else, as provided by section 1(1) of the Children Act 1989, the welfare of the child was the paramount consideratin, and the court was concerned with the interests of the mother and the father only in so far as they bore on the welfare of the child.
2 It was almost always in the interests of a child whose parents were separated that he or she whould have contact with the parent with whom the child was not living.
3 The court had power to enforce orders for contact, which it should not hesitate to exercise where it judged that that would overall promote the welfare of the child to do so.
4 Cases did not, unhappily and infrequently but occasionally, arise in which a court was compelled to conclude that in existing circumstances an order for immediate direct contact should not be ordered, because so to order would injure the welfare of the child: see In re D (a Minor) (Contact: Mother’s hostility)
5 In cases in which, for whatever reasons, direct contact could not for te time being be ordered, it was ordinarily highly desirable that there should be indirect contact so that the child grew up knowing of the love and interest of the absent parent with whom, in due course, direct contact should be established.’ After referring to In Re O: ‘The courts should not at all readily acept that the child’s welfare will be injured by direct contact. Jodging that question, the court should take a medium-term and long-term view of the child’s development and not accord excessive weight to what appear likely to be short-term or transient problems. Neither parent should be encouraged or permitted to think that the more unreasonable, the more obdurate and the more unco-operative they are, the more likely thay are to go their own way.’
Judges:
Sir Thomas Bingham MR
Citations:
Times 17-Mar-1995, [1995] 2 FLR 124
Statutes:
Jurisdiction:
England and Wales
Citing:
Cited – In Re D (a Minor) (Contact: Mother’s Hostility) CA 1993
Waite LJ: ‘It is now well settled that the implacable hostility of a mother towards access or contact is a factor which is capable, according to the circumstances of each particular case, of supplying a cogent reason for departing from the general . .
Cited – In re J (a Minor) (Contact) CA 1994
Balcombe LJ said: ‘But before concluding this judgment, I would like to make three general points. The first is that judges should be very reluctant to allow the implacable hostility of one parent (usually the parent who has a residence order in his . .
Cited by:
Cited – In Re P (Minors) (Contact) CA 15-May-1996
The father appealed an order refusing him direct contact with the child. The judge had made the order because he considered that the mother’s hostility to contact made it likely that her health would suffer if contact was ordered, and that the . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Children
Updated: 27 October 2022; Ref: scu.82084