The Court of Appeal has dismissed a father’s appeal against a High Court refusal to order his daughter’s return to Moldova under the Hague Convention on International Child Abduction. The court accepted the Moldovan courts’ determination that the child’s removal was not wrongful under the Convention. It did not decide whether she should now be returned, or determine the mother’s cross-appeal.
The child, identified in the judgment as A, was 11 months old when her mother brought her from Moldova to Ireland on 10 July 2015. She has lived in Ireland since. The parents had a notarised agreement allowing travel to Canada with A for a year, from December 2014, but the mother travelled to Ireland instead. The father said he had not consented to A’s permanent removal.
The father applied for A’s return under the Convention. The High Court refused the application in July 2016, finding that he did not have custody rights for the Convention application. The Court of Appeal first considered the father’s appeal in 2017 but deferred its decision, directing him to seek a determination from the Moldovan courts under Article 15 on whether the removal breached his custody rights under Moldovan law.
A Moldovan first-instance court rejected the father’s claim in March 2018. The Chisinau Court of Appeal upheld that decision in June 2020, and Moldova’s Supreme Court rejected a further appeal as inadmissible in November 2020. The Irish Court of Appeal said it was not bound by the Moldovan determination, but had to decide the Convention issue itself.
The Irish court accepted that the father had a right under Moldovan law to object to A’s permanent removal, which counted as a custody right under the Convention. It concluded, however, that the Moldovan courts had considered whether that right was breached and had found that it was not. They relied on the father’s notarised consent to travel for a year and on his failure to prove that the mother left Moldova intending to establish permanent residence in Ireland. The Irish court found no basis to depart from that determination.
The court therefore dismissed the father’s appeal against the High Court order. It made no order on the mother’s cross-appeal because it was unnecessary to consider it. The judgment also did not decide whether A should be returned to Moldova years after her arrival in Ireland. The matter is to be listed later for disposal of the father’s appeal and any applications concerning costs.