Rusinova’s EU Family Law Handbook: Part 2 Litigating International Child Abduction

As the Author informs:

Part 2 follows the progression of an actual return case rather than the order of the Convention’s provisions. It begins with identifying the applicable legal framework and determining whether a removal or retention falls within the Convention, then follows the litigation positions of the applicant and respondent through the exceptions to return, evidence, child participation, domestic violence, protective measures, parallel proceedings and agreements, before turning to the return decision, appeals, enforcement, further abduction and post-decision proceedings.

At the centre of the book is comparative case law. The handbook contains 481 case notes, drawing on national decisions from 23 jurisdictions: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, and United States,  together with judgments of the Court of Justice of the European Union and the European Court of Human Rights. The cases include first-instance as well as appellate and supreme-court decisions and are used to show how apparently abstract Convention rules operate when applied to particular facts, evidence and procedural choices.

The comparative approach reveals a complicated picture: similar questions recur across legal systems, but outcomes remain highly sensitive to the facts, the evidence available and the stage at which an argument arises. The handbook therefore pairs concise legal propositions with factual case examples, enabling readers to move from a practical problem to the relevant legal question and then to the underlying authority.

Particular attention is given to issues that can determine litigation: the proof and classification of custody rights, actual exercise, consent and acquiescence, the one-year period and settlement, grave risk and intolerable situations, child objections, burdens of proof, foreign-law evidence, hearing the child, domestic violence, adequate arrangements and protective measures, the relationship between return and parental-responsibility proceedings, the contents of the return order, appeals, enforcement and the Brussels IIb overriding mechanism. The interaction between the 1980 Hague Convention, Brussels IIb and the 1996 Hague Child Protection Convention is addressed throughout. 

The Handbook can be consulted and downloaded here. For Part 1 check our previous post here.