M (A Child)

The parties to this application are the parents of a little girl, Karolina, who is four years of age. They did not marry but they cohabited in Estonia relatively briefly until their relationship foundered in 2009. Thereafter arrangements were made for the father, the plaintiff in the court below, to have contact with his daughter, and when the voluntary arrangements became difficult he seised the Estonian court in Tallinn and various orders were made which ran so long as both parents and child were within that jurisdiction.

However, in May 2010 the mother, with her husband and the very young child of her marriage, came to this jurisdiction. That inevitably was viewed as an abdication by the father. He engaged the central authority of the Estonian state who engaged the central authority here in London who issued proceedings under the 1980 Convention, an originating summons being filed on 16 August. Case management orders were made on that day, on 23 August and on 27 August resulting in a final hearing before Macur J on 24 September last.

It is to be noted that the jurisdictions engaged, Estonia and the United Kingdom, are both European Member States and therefore both bound by Regulation Brussels II bis. By Article 11.3 of that Regulation, the obligation on the court engaged is to conclude proceedings within 42 days of issue, so this is a good example of the London court acting expeditiously to meet the obligation imposed by Article 11.

The applicant had appeared with her husband in person before the judge on one of the case management hearings, but for the purposes of the trial before Macur J she had solicitors and a specialist junior counsel, Mr Devereux, who has a lot of experience and expertise in this field. The statements before the judge consisted of the mother's statement in answer of 8 September and the father's statement in reply of the 20th. An examination of those statements reveals that the mother's case before the judge was that her arrival in this country was simply for the purposes of a summer holiday, because she asserted that the school age in Estonia is seven, and that in any event the summer holidays are long, leisurely holidays and so she was here for the summer and no more than that.

So she was asserting a case that challenged the label of abduction but offered no shield to an order for peremptory return. The summer, which she asserted was the purpose and duration of her visit, was spent, and so for the judge her plain duty on the husband's application, scarcely resisted by the wife, was to make a return order in due regard to our Convention obligations as an acceding state.

So the order below was inevitable. No defence within the strict limits of exceptions that are recognised under Articles 12 and 13 had even been asserted let alone made good, and the judge's order was compassionate to the mother to the extent that the judge allowed her an extra week to get ready for return. The father had pressed for return on the 7th but the judge gave her till 12 noon tomorrow, the 15th. The judge imposed an obligation on her to notify in writing the father's solicitors of the flight that she had bought in order to comply with paragraph 1 of the order. That obligation, the paragraph 4 obligation, was not fulfilled and perhaps the mother felt and indeed may reasonably have felt that she had escaped compliance because on the previous day, the 6^th, she had lodged an appellant's notice here which was sealed on 8 October.

So the next point that I emphasise is that although the regulation does not specify a period within which an appeal must be determined, the practice in this court is to put any application for permission in a Hague case before one of the supervising Family Justices at the earliest date. So the mother's notice, sealed on 8 October, was considered by Wilson LJ three days later on the 11^th and he, having read the notice, ordered that the application be listed today for two hours before three members of the court as an application on notice with appeal to follow if permission granted.

Sadly the inevitable advice given by Mr Devereux on 24 September led to his discharge. He was plainly accepting before the judge that the only issue to be considered was not whether a return should be ordered but how a return should be effected, the practicalities, when, in what manner; and that realistic approach was obviously unpalatable to the mother and led to Mr Devereux's discharge. However, her solicitor remained throughout the proceedings below. She has had no legal advice in relation to proceedings in this court. We have only a bare appellant's notice. We have no grounds of appeal. There is some indication of her intended deployment in Section 9 of her appellant's notice but no grounds and no skeleton. She speaks no English, she is here today with an interpreter and we have endeavoured to focus her submission on the relevant provisions of international family law and to emphasise to her the role of this court not as a court of trial but as a court of review. It is very hard to distil from the mother's words this afternoon, spoken through the mouth of the interpreter, anything that could be classified as a pertinent submission, a proper attack, a sustainable attack on the judgment below.

I understand the applicant's distress, desperation, determination to avoid the consequences of the order below, but the reality is that this is the end of the line. This is the end of her appellate right. There is now nothing that remains but the processes of enforcement and implementation which lies still principally with the High Court, with the Family Division judge, Mrs Kirby is going to make an application this afternoon to the applications judge in the Family Division for further directions as to implementation and enforcement. The order as drawn below is not well crafted in the first paragraph in that it simply directs the return by not later than noon tomorrow, but then provides:

We are told that his flight departs at 16.50 in the afternoon. The deficiency within the sentence that I have cited is that there is no precision as to when the mother shall render Karolina to the care of her father. Plainly there is no intention in the applicant to comply with paragraph 1 of the order. She has not complied with paragraph 4. When asked this afternoon what arrangements she has made for travel tomorrow we were told that none had been made.

So there is a real problem of implementation. Nobody would wish to see implementation and enforcement proceed to the point where Karolina was separated from her mother. Her mother is primary carer, has always been primary carer and it really is a step of last resort to separate Karolina from her mother. But that will happen if there is continuing defiance of the order of the judge, and it may be that professional agencies would have to be engaged (such as the Cafcass service in the Thomas More Building, such as the relevant local authority) to ensure that if Karolina is to be separated from her mother it is done with maximum professionalism to minimise the damage to the child.

But all that can be considered by a judge in the Family Division within the next hour. The only last word I add is that I support the applicant's criticism of paragraph 3 of the order, which does seem as written to be exorbitant. Any ne exeat provision in relation to Karolina after her return to her habitual residence should be made by the Estonian court, not by a London judge, and it seems to me that it is necessary to write into paragraph 3 of the order below by way of amendment under the slip rule a limitation to the effect that that order runs only for a very brief period pending the first return to the court in Estonia which is already seised with the welfare issues.

So I would simply refuse this application for permission

I entirely agree

So do I.