Approximately 500 Hague applications filed each year in England and Wales
The UK government has agreed to examine how domestic abuse features in international child-abduction cases under the 1980 Hague Convention, a move campaigners say could give greater legal protection to British mothers accused of abduction after fleeing abusive partners abroad. The Ministry of Justice’s private international family law team will analyze all cases held in the High Court in London between 2024 and 2025, the Guardian reported, calling the review the first of its kind.
The Hague Convention requires signatory countries to return children who have been unilaterally removed abroad within six weeks so that courts in their home countries can decide on future arrangements. Campaigners hope the analysis, the first of its kind, will disprove the four-decade-old assumptions, baked into the convention, that all child abduction is harmful and that children must be returned immediately for overseas courts to decide their futures.
Approximately 500 Hague applications for the return of a child are filed each year in England and Wales, and between 10% and 20% of children affected end up separated from their primary carer through a formal court-ordered return, the Guardian reported.
One woman, identified only as Claire, told the Guardian she had lived in the United States with an abusive partner and their two small children for more than a decade before escaping. “We were all terrified of him. I was in near-constant fear for my life,” she said. “Eventually, I escaped and got us all on a plane back home to the UK.” After living in hiding for three months, she said, she had to apply for benefits. “Within a day, the police were at our door with summons under the Hague convention to appear in court just nine days later.”
Claire used all her savings to instruct a barrister, and her children were able to stay in the UK. “I barely stood any chance even with legal representation – all my evidence of the domestic abuse was ignored,” she said. “It was only because my barrister persuaded the judge to let my oldest child, who was a few weeks short of the 14 years when courts will listen to their views, give evidence that I won the case.”
Ruth Dineen, international coordinator of the Filia Hague Mothers campaign, said the convention had been introduced in 1980 to protect children from the harmful effects of wrongful removal from their home country. “But the circumstances surrounding international child abduction have changed substantially since then,” she said. “There are far more relationships between parents of different nationalities, so it’s much more common for families to live abroad. We also have a far greater understanding of the impact of domestic abuse and coercive control.”
Roz Osborne, head of the charity Globalarrk, said she hoped the government analysis would help level the playing field for victims of domestic abuse. “At the moment, victims do not have access to equal legal support, due to legal aid inequalities, which causes delay or – worse – no legal representation at all for the victim survivor,” she said. “Where respondents do not meet the means and merits test and pay, they can lose substantial funds, even when winning their case, putting them in debt.”
“Victims have no access to emotional support in the High Court, via a domestic abuse support worker,” Osborne added. Summary hearings, she said, do not allow sufficient understanding of the risks victims face and often underestimate those risks. “Children’s safety is inseparable from their primary carer’s safety, most often the mother, and this is not recognised,” Osborne said. In addition, she said, children are not acknowledged as victims in their own right as they are under domestic abuse legislation in the UK.
Dr Adrienne Barnett, director of Right to Equality, said there was a “dearth of basic data” around these cases. “On top of not knowing how often domestic violence is alleged and found, we don’t even know what percentage of returning parents are mothers,” she said. “We don’t know how many cases end in children being returned without their parent, whether the children say they don’t want to be sent home or what protective measures are put in place when they are.”
Lisa Smart, a Liberal Democrat MP and long-term campaigner on the shortcomings of the Hague Convention, said the analysis was long overdue. “A parent – often but not always the mother – who escapes to this country to protect themselves and their children from violence should not find themselves faced with a legal mechanism that treats them as a wrongdoer,” Smart said. “Yet that is precisely the situation too many find themselves in.”
A Home Office spokesperson said there was no timeline for the new research but that it was “intended to provide robust evidence to inform possible future government policy on the effective operation of the convention in England and Wales in these complex and sensitive cases.”
Alison Shalaby, chief executive of Reunite, said it remained vital that children were returned immediately to their parents when abducted. “The Hague convention provides a clear, unbiased court process that the left-behind parent can follow,” she said. “It provides plenty of defences and opportunities for parents under the convention in England and Wales, where legal aid is available where there is domestic abuse.”