D.C. Circuit Decides Its First Child Abduction Convention Appeal [1]
On December 27, 2019, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals issued its judgment in the case Abou-Haidar v. Sanin Vasquez [3] on the interpretation of the 1980 Hague Convention on Civil Aspects of Child Abduction [4]. This was the first case on the Convention to reach the D.C. Circuit. Articles 3 and 12 of the Convention provide that “retention of a child is to be considered wrongful [where] . . . it is in breach of rights of custody attributed to a person . . . under the law of the State in which the child was habitually resident immediately before” the retention. The appellant contested the lower court’s findings that she wrongfully retained in the U.S. the child in question because the retention breached the appellee’s custody rights under the law of France, which the Court determined was the child’s habitual residence. Because the Court of Appeals found no reversible error in the lower court’s factual determinations or legal conclusions, the Court of Appeals affirmed its ruling.