Boy burned his passport so he could stay with his father

The Family Court has had to rule on the finely balanced case of a 13-year-old boy who burned his passport so he could stay with his father in England rather than return to his mother in Portugal.

The boy’s parents had separated after a brief marriage. After long legal proceedings, the mother was granted custody and the boy went to live with her in her native Portugal. The father was granted extensive contact arrangements.

The boy enjoyed a long holiday with his father in the summer of 2008. Shortly before he was due to return in September, he told his father that he had burned both his British and his Portuguese passports so that he would not be able to return to Portugal.

The father told the mother that, as she had their son’s birth certificate, she would have to apply for a new passport for him. She appeared to make no effort to do this and so the father enrolled the boy in a local school.

In April 2009, the father found the boy’s British passport. The mother then began legal proceedings claiming that the father had wrongfully retained the boy in England.

The court held that the father had not wrongfully retained the boy to begin with because he was prepared to let him return to Portugal. He was only prevented from doing so by the fact that the boy said he had burned his passport.

However, the father’s attitude then changed because the boy made it clear that he did not want to return to Portugal. The father became uncooperative and opposed the mother’s attempts to get her son back.

This amounted to wrongful retention. However, the court held that the boy should still be allowed to stay in England with his father. This was because the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction 1980 allowed for a “child’s objections” to be taken into account in cases like this.

It stated that if a child objected to being “returned” to one of his parents, the court should take account of his views as long as he was mature enough to speak for himself. Other conditions also had to be met. For example, it had to be clear that child’s views were realistic and had not been influenced by parental pressure.

The court was satisfied that the conditions were met in this case and so the boy was allowed to remain in England with his father.

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March 2010

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