US Supreme Court rules that district courts may expedite international child custody disputes when child safety is at issue

News

US Supreme Court rules that district courts may expedite international child custody disputes when child safety is at issue

Casey McGowan | Vermont Law School, US

June 15, 2022 11:12:22 pm

The US Supreme Court Wednesday broadened federal courts’ abilities to decide whether a child in an international custody dispute has to return to their home country by saying that courts do not need to consider “all possible ameliorative measures” for a child’s return when a child is at risk of grave harm.

In the case of Golan v. Saada, Narkis Golan traveled to the US, where she is a citizen, in 2018 for a wedding and brought her son with Isacco Saada along. Saada was abusive toward Golan but not his son. Golan did not return to the Italy and moved into a domestic violence shelter. Saada requested that his son be returned to Italy under Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction.

A US district court held Golan’s son was to return to Italy. However the court recognized that the child would be at risk of harm because of Saada’s abusive history with Golan, and ordered Saada to pay Golan $30,000 and to stay away from her. The court also ruled that he could only visit the son with Golan’s consent. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit overturned the order as it found the District Court’s measures to protect Golan’s son from harm “insufficient.” The Court of Appeals ordered the district court to undertake a nine-month examination to ascertain how to return Golan’s son to Italy safely.

In the unanimous decision written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor vacating the Second Circuit’s decision, Sotomayor that “a district court has no obligation under the Convention to consider ameliorative measures that have not been raised by the parties” but that “it ordinarily should address ameliorative measures raised by the parties or obviously suggested by the circumstances of the case.”

Sotomayor expressed that the district court should “move as expeditiously as possible to reach a final decision without further unnecessary delay,” since the remand “delays” the case from reaching a conclusion and the case has “spanned years longer than it should have.” Sotomayor in the opinion stated that “The District Court made a finding of grave risk, but never had the opportunity to engage in the discretionary inquiry as to whether to order or deny return under the correct legal standard.”

The Supreme Court remanded the case back to the district court for further proceedings.

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail

On April 16, 1963, an incarcerated Martin Luther King, Jr. (arrested for demonstrating in defiance of a court order) wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail in response to a published statement by eight fellow clergymen from Alabama.

Part of the letter read: We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. Read the full text of the Letter.