Child abductions and treaty interpretation

Private international law is, of course, a huge topic.  A leisurely flip through the 1390 pages of Cheshire and North’s comprehensive text reveals the subject’s breadth.  As society becomes more mobile and borders more porous, e.g. the European Union, private international law will only likely continue to grow.

One of the most “private” areas of private international law is international family law (which is, oddly enough, my focus area—see, e.g., my blog).  Just this month, the United States Supreme Court heard a case involving a major private international family law convention, the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction.

The Convention’s name tends to confuse some lay readers—it only deals with jurisdiction in cross-border custody disputes, not the more sinister cases that the words “child abduction” connote.  The Convention primarily preserves jurisdiction in child custody disputes by providing an immediate return if a parent wrongfully removes a child from its country of habitual residence.

The father in the case before the U.S. Supreme Court, Abbott v. Abbott, contended that the mother wrongfully removed their child from Chile.  The cases focuses on the ne exeat issue under the Convention.

Courts use ne exeat orders to preserve jurisdiction in custody disputes by forbidding a custodial parent from taking a child outside of a court’s jurisdiction without…

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