Posts tagged ‘foreign maintenance orders’
An early pitch for the Hague Maintenance Convention
In private international family law, a party (an obligee, that is) may face a legal maze when enforcing a foreign spousal support/maintenance order against a former spouse (an obligor). The U.S. state courts offer an illustrative example.
But before heading Stateside, I will mention some private international law instruments on this topic.
The Hague Conference on Private International Law has completed the Convention of 23 November 2007 on the International Recovery of Child Support and Other Forms of Maintenance. However, with only two signatories (the U.S. and Burkina Faso) and no ratification, this convention has not entered into force.
Nor do previous instruments offer much help. The predecessor 1973 Hague Conventions on the topic garnered relatively meager support. Some reciprocal agreements exist between the U.S. or U.S. states and other countries, but careful analysis reveals little uniformity among these agreements.
Thus, private international law agreements do not—yet—provide much clear help on this subject.
So in the U.S., domestic courts play the leading role, and the first issue in the domestic courts will be recognition. For those readers yearning for the “good old” private international law days, we now turn to the familiar subjects of comity and jurisdiction-specific law.
Based on comity, U.S. courts may recognize foreign maintenance orders. Comity—very generally—is a largely judicial doctrine whereby foreign court orders were obtained through proceedings in a foreign state…
