The High Court found beyond reasonable doubt that a father wilfully disobeyed court orders by preventing his daughter from seeing her mother during March and April 2020. It declined to commit him to prison, citing the late service of the orders with a penal endorsement and the likely harm imprisonment would cause the child. The court awarded the mother her costs of the motion.
The judgment, delivered electronically by Mr Justice Jordan on 23 October 2020, concerned a motion by the mother for the father’s attachment and committal for alleged breaches of access arrangements. The parents had divorced in 2018. An order made by the High Court in April 2019 provided for the mother to have access to their adopted daughter, identified in the judgment as L., for three days each week.
The mother said she lost access during the first Covid-19 restrictions and that further access was later reduced. The father said he and L. had Covid-like symptoms, that his household needed to isolate, and that L. did not want to attend access. The court rejected his account that access could not take place in March and April, finding inconsistencies in his explanations. It said he had used the public health emergency to frustrate access and disrupt the mother-daughter relationship.
The court found the father’s conduct before 8 May 2020 amounted to contempt. It distinguished that period from what followed: apart from a specific incident at L.’s school on 11 September 2020, the court said it could not find beyond reasonable doubt that his conduct after 8 May was wilful disobedience. The court noted that L.’s wishes may by then have become a factor, while finding that the earlier interruption of access had probably influenced her position.
The court said committal could be justified for the school incident, but declined to order imprisonment in light of L.’s welfare. It also found the order with the required penal endorsement had not been served until 30 July 2020, after the main breaches during lockdown. It warned that continued defiance could bring the father within the rare cases where imprisonment is a last resort.
The decision was limited to the committal motion. The court said an application to vary access was being made in the Circuit Court and left it to the mother whether to seek enforcement there. In a separate costs appendix, it ordered the father to pay the mother’s costs of the committal motion, to be adjudicated if the parties could not agree.