Introduction

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/fcre.12414
• Author: Judith L. Kreeger
• Date: 01 April 2019
• Published date: 01 April 2019

SPECIAL ARTICLES ON THE HAGUE CONVENTION

INTRODUCTION

The 1980 Hague Convention on Parental Child Abduction became effective in the United States

upon ratification in 1998. We now have 98 treaty partners, and our Central Authority, the

U.S. Department of State, has designated four judges to participate as members of the Hague Con-

ference’s international network of family court judges. The international network now includes

135 judges from all over the world who engage in permissible direct judicial communications about

international family law cases. In the United States, left-behind parents may file in state or federal

court their cases seeking the return of a child who they claim has been wrongfully abducted from

his or her country of habitual residence. According to the terms of the 1980 Convention, those

cases should be resolved within six weeks of their filing, start to finish.

As one might imagine, this deadline presents a challenge to all professionals who are involved in

these cases: the parties, the judges, the lawyers, the mental health professionals, and the fact wit-

nesses. The first issue is whether the left-behind parent has a right of custody to the child, pursuant to

the law of the place of habitual residence. If a taking parent asserts the Section 13(b) defense that

return of the child to the place of habitual residence would present a grave risk of harm to the child,

the judge who is responsible for the case may want to obtain an expert evaluation of that risk. Travel

by the left-behind parent to the tribunal responsible for the case may be too expensive for that parent,

and the tribunal may need adequate technology to enable that parent to appear for proceedings via

Skype or some other similar means. Often the left-behind parent’s case seeking the return of the child

is not the only legal action involving that child—there may be custody proceedings pending else-

where, there may be a request seeking asylum for the child, or there may be criminal proceedings

involving family members arising out of the removal of the child from the place of habitual residence.

This issue and the next issue of Family Court Review include articles that focus on appropriate use of

the U.S. network judges,legal issues that areraised in these cases, and particularly nowadays the compli-

cation of immigration issues for these children. This issue contains ar ticles written by Sir Mathew

Thorpe, who proposed the creation of the international judicial network in 1998 and for many years was

an internationally recognized jurist who excelled in the field of international family law, Mary Sheffield,

an appellate judge who is presently one of the four U.S. network judges, and James Garbolino, who until

recently was the first U.S. network judge and is a distinguished scholar concerning the 1980 Convention.

Judge Judith Kreeger

Active Senior Judge

Eleventh Judicial Circuit of Florida

73 West Flagler Street

Miami-Dade County, Florida, USA

Corresponding: judykreeger@gmail.com

FAMILY COURT REVIEW, Vol. 57 No. 2, April 2019 158

© 2019 Association of Family and Conciliation Courts