[2025] EWHC 911 (Fam)

This appeal is about the court’s jurisdiction to make orders in relation to a child and, in particular, the concept of habitual residence. For convenience, I shall refer to the appellant as ‘the mother’ and to the respondent as ‘the father’. I mean no disrespect to either of them by doing so.

The appeal concerns the parties’ daughter G who was born on June 2010 and is now aged 14 ¾. She has an older sister, L, who was born on June 2007 and is fast approaching her eighteenth birthday. Both children were the subject of the proceedings below, but the appeal relates only to the younger girl.

On 27 August 2024 G travelled with her father to the USA. On 3 June 2024, HHJ Raeside had made a consent order which allowed him to relocate permanently to that jurisdiction with both children. The US authorities, however, refused L a visa and so he went with G alone.

Some six weeks later, on 12 October 2024, the mother made an application to amend the June order. The object of her application was to procure G’s return to this jurisdiction in circumstances where G herself had been expressing deep unhappiness about her situation in the USA and a desire to come back to England virtually from the time of her arrival.

Delays in the court system which were not the fault of either parent meant that the application was not fully considered by HHJ Raeside until 6 March 2025. After reviewing the papers and without convening a hearing she dismissed the application for lack of jurisdiction, determining that G was ‘now’ almost certainly habitually resident in the USA. The issue on this appeal is whether this decision was wrong.