India’s Notorious Section 498A: Divorce Law as Criminal Law
Blog India’s amendments to its Criminal Procedure Code are now effective. They may ameliorate some of the harshest aspects of India’s infamous Section 498A. The newly- enacted provisions take away the powers of the police to arrest in cases of alleged offenses which carry a maximum sentence up to seven years of imprisonment. Such offenses […]
Divorce, Bigamy & Naturalization
Blog Problems arising from void or voidable marriages often do not create issues until many years after the fact and in quite expected ways. Such was the experience of one Kanadi Mohamed Ali, an Israeli citizen whose conviction for knowingly making a false statement under oath relating to naturalization, citizenship, or registry of aliens in […]
Singapore Prenuptial Agreements – Important Decision
Blog The Singapore Court of Appeal has just rendered a weighty and well-reasoned decision on the enforceability of prenuptial agreements in the case of TQ v TR, [2009] SGCA 6 (Feb. 3, 2009).The opinion is especially important for its analysis of the (substantial) weight to be given in Singapore to foreign prenuptial agreements as compared to […]
Money in misery: International marriages
Blog The current issue of The Economist has a great article by Edward Lucas on international family law. The title is Money in misery: International marriages are crumbling with the global economy, revealing unseen pitfalls in cross-border divorce law. Good news for lawyers. Some extracts are: According to Jeremy Morley, an international divorce lawyer based in […]
Brazil’s Compliance with the Hague Abduction Convention is Questioned
Blog Karen Mazurkewich, Financial Post Published: Saturday, December 27, 2008 Francois Larivee is fighting for the return of his five-year-old son from Brazil. But being on the right side of the law is cold comfort to the 38-year-old businessman. He has won two court decisions in Brazil, and has followed The Hague Convention on the […]
California Disclosure Rules Scare Wealthy Spouses
Blog Further evidence that California is an excellent jurisdiction for a spouse who does not have complete knowledge of the other spouses’s financial condition is supplied by the just-issued decision in In re Marriage of Straus, 2009 WL 98447 Cal.App. 4 Dist.,2009. In that case the appellate court upheld an award of $3,000 in sanctions against the […]
Texas Court Holds that Mexico’s Legal System is Ineffective
Blog It is unfortunate that courts are usually extremely reluctant to judge the effectiveness of other countries’ legal systems, even when such findings need to be made in international custody and visitation cases. Judges often feel great discomfort in making negative findings as to a sovereign country’s judges and courts. They may feel that they […]
China and International Child Abduction
Blog We were recently asked to research the issue of potential child abduction in China and the remedies for securing the return from China of a child if the Chinese national parent kept her in that country. The results of our research were depressing. China is not a party to the Hague Convention on the […]
English Court OKs Post-Nups, Landmark Case
Blog Congratulations to our victorious client, Rod MacLeod, to whom we rendered extensive advice from afar throughout his long-standing divorce case in the courts of the Isle of Man and then in the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. The case has resulted in a landmark decision today in favor of our client by the […]
Irish court: 6-year old to be heard in Hague Abduction Case
Blog An Irish court has ruled in a Hague Abduction Convention case that a child of just six years of age should be heard by the Court in determining whether to return the child to his habitual residence in another (unnamed) European Union country. N. -v- N. [hearing a child], [2008] IEHC 382. Ms Justice Finlay […]