Mother is lonely and unhappy
Court of Noord-Holland, The Netherlands, April 15th 2022
The father and mother are Brazilian. They came to live in the Netherlands in 2018 because of the father’s work. The children are young, the oldest has just started school. Parents are in a divorce.
The mother is unhappy in the Netherlands. She cannot find a job there, cannot pay for a good house and has no social life there. She doesn’t speak the language.
The father has a new (Dutch) partner with whom he is expecting a child. He doesn’t speak the language either, but wants to continue living there.
Expats
The court sees them as expats, who only live in the Netherlands because of the father’s work. Therefore the court finds that the woman cannot be held to continue living in the Netherlands after the relationship has ended. She has the right and a legitimate interest to rearrange her life and return to her family and homeland.
Father has chosen to live his life as an expat
Mother has prepared and thought through the move well. The move will have consequences for the contact between the father and the children. However, mother’s interest entails that certain consequences as far as that contact is concerned are acceptable. It is taken into account that the father has chosen to organize his life as an expat which is linked to the fact that he has to travel or video call to maintain family relations. The father is already used to this with his older son who is living in Brazil.
The court also took into account that the children are at such an age that they will be able to integrate flexibly and easily into a new environment.
The Child Protection Board had offered to investigate, but indicated that it would be complicated to get a good picture of the children’s perspective in Brazil. The court did not consider an investigation necessary and considered itself sufficiently informed to make a decision.
Working on line
It is noteworthy that the court noted that the father did not argue that he cannot continue his job in Brazil (online), as if the possibility of working online from another country is nowadays an assumption rather than an exception.
Read more about child relocation
Read more about child relocation and child abduction in the Netherlands
All blogs from The Author:
- The use of Foreign Experts in 1980 Hague Convention Cases
- Cross-Border Child Relocation Dispute: Strategic Legal Intervention Between Egypt and Vietnam
- Child Placement and Co-Parenting in Italy
- Getting a child from the jungle
- Dealing with international child abduction
- No return order due to ratified parental agreement
- Abducted in Italy
- Father’s Rights in International Law
- Care arrangement from Dubai
- Return order to Israel
- Permission not required
- Supporting families and colleagues through the CALA
- International Law in Domestic Courts: A Note on Child Litigation in the UK
- The wishes of a child in a Hague Convention procedure in Hungary
- The voice of the child in Hungarian abduction procedure
- Towards a Comprehensive Approach to International Child Abduction Situations
- Act of Fraudulent Commission of Reality
- Article 13b defence
- My child has been abducted to Brazil
- Return order not required
- Brazil’s new era in child abduction cases
- ASIME congress november 2023
- International Child Abduction and The Hague Convention
- International child abduction case leads to indirect recognition of LBGTQ+ families in Greece (?)
- What is the law with parental child abduction in the UK?