CA-2025-000682 - [2025] EWCA Civ 1058

Transnational marriage abandonment is itself a form of domestic abuse and harm to children.

PD12J paragraph 2B states that:

Paragraph 3 defines ‘abandonment’:

“Abandonment” refers to the practice whereby a husband, in England and Wales, deliberately abandons or “strands” his foreign national wife abroad, usually without financial resources, in order to prevent her from asserting matrimonial and/or residence rights in England and Wales. It may involve children who are either abandoned with, or separated from, their mother.

The significance of TMA in a case of child abduction is that it compounds the abduction by severing the child from the left-behind parent, which is often the perpetrator’s intention. In an appropriate case, the court should, as a matter of common justice to the left-behind parent, recognise TMA for what it is: an extreme form of domestic abuse and harm towards them and the children.

Re A (Children) [2019] EWCA Civ 74; [2019] 1 FLR 1175 was cited to the judge. It was an appeal by a mother, who had been stranded in Pakistan after the family had spent time there, with the father removing her passport and returning to England with the children. The judge in that case declined to make a finding that the mother had been stranded on the basis that she had remedies available to her and had managed to get back to England by the time of the hearing.

The appeal was allowed. At paragraph 70-71 of his leading judgment, Moylan LJ stated that:

“70.

… It is clear from the Practice Direction that the words abandonment and stranding are not terms of art and that they are not intended to be applied in a formulaic manner. This is because there are a number of ways in which a spouse might be said to have been abandoned or stranded abroad or in which the other spouse might have sought to achieve this. I would agree with Mr Gration when he submitted that cases can include many differing elements which militates against their being placed in distinct categories.

71.

The core feature of the concept of stranding or abandonment is the exploitation or the attempted exploitation by one spouse of the other’s vulnerability or weakness to seek to ensure that they are not able to come to or return to the UK. As Peter Jackson J (as he then was) said in ZM v AM (Stranded Spouse) [2014] EWHC 2110 (Fam), [2014] Fam Law 1402, at para [1], it can be the ‘opportunity’ the secure immigration status of one spouse and the insecure immigration status of the other gives ‘the former to exploit the latter’s weakness’. However, as PD 12J makes clear, it is based more generally on ‘controlling, coercive or threatening behaviour, violence or abuse’.”

And he continued at paragraph 78:

“… the manner in which a spouse can act in order to seek to prevent the other spouse returning to the UK can take many forms. In my view, it is not helpful to seek to assess what has happened in any case by reference to any notional concept of the ‘classic’ case. As set out above, stranding is a broad concept and can include any action taken by a spouse which puts obstacles in the way of the other spouse being able to return to the UK. In some respects, it matters not whether the attempt is successful or not. Even if not successful it could still support a conclusion of controlling or coercive behaviour as referred to in PD 12J.”

These observations were made before PD12J was updated to harmonise with the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, but the operative provisions of the current practice direction are unchanged as regards TMA.

Accordingly, the father’s submission to us – that his actions did not amount to TMA because the mother had no rights to assert and he (being dependent upon L for his presence here) had no rights to bestow – is mere sophistry, and I reject it.