Children’s best intrest

In Re S (Children) (Child Abduction: Asylum Appeal) (FD TLR 9 May)

The mother of two children habitually resident in India had brought them to this country without their father’s consent. On the father’s application for the children to be summarily returned to India the judge was satisfied that, subject to the undertakings offered by the father, it was in the children’s best interests to be returned to India as quickly as possible. He rejected the mother’s contention that pending the hearing of her appeal against the refusal of asylum the court was precluded by s15 of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 from directing the return of the children to India. The removal of a child to its country of habitual residence was not a removal by an act of State but a removal by the parents exercising their joint responsibility or by the court exercising its powers. The High Court was not a government agency. Section 15 of the 1999 Act did not prevent a family judge from exercising his powers, whether under international Convention, statute or wardship, to return a child to the country of its habitual residence where that return was in the child’s best interests, whether or not the child was the dependant of an asylum applicant, as here, or had made an asylum application in his own right.