A couple went to live in Scotland with their children. The father was Scottish: the mother English. The mother left the family home and took the children to England without the father’s knowledge, and obtained an ex-parte residence order and a prohibited steps order to prevent the father from removing the children. She also issued a divorce petition. The Circuit Judge in England made an ex-parte injunction restraining the father from instituting proceedings in Scotland. The judge decided that England was the appropriate jurisdiction for the divorce proceedings. The father appealed.
Held: The court allowed his appeal. The judge had been wrong to decide either that the children had no habitual residence or that they were habitually resident in England. The grant of an injunction was inconsistent with the legislative framework provided by the 1973 Act. Undeer Schedule 1, paragraph 8(1), if a petition was presented in that part of the United Kingdom where parties were habitually resident when they last lived together, then any earlier petition presented in a different part of the United Kingdom by the other party to the marriage had to be stayed in favour of the petition presented in the place where the parties were habitually resident. Parliament not only permitted the father to present his petition in Scotland, but expressly provided that if he did so, the mother’s English proceedings should be stayed, and the English court should thereafter have no jurisdiction to make an order under Section 8 of the Children Act 1989 unless it was necessary to do so in order to deal with urgent matters.
Judges:
Butler-Sloss LJ
Citations:
[1997] 2 FLR 263
Statutes:
Domicile and Matrimonial Proceedings Act 1973
Jurisdiction:
England and Wales
Cited by:
Cited – B v B (Residence: Imposition of conditions) CA 28-May-2004
The court was asked whether it had jurisdiction to hear applications with regard to a child removed from Scotland. The father lived in Scotland, and the mother and child in England. The child had been habitually resident in Scotland and removed to . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Children, Jurisdiction, Scotland
Updated: 03 February 2022; Ref: scu.197889