Summary
The parental responsibility proceedings were in respect of a child, LR, born in July 2005. The child and the mother were living together till February 2011 in England.
In February 2011, they moved to Germany where they started living with the maternal grandparents and aunt. Although the mother returned to England in April 2011, the child remained living with the grandparents in Germany.
In February 2013, the child, the grandparents, and the aunt moved to Luxembourg.
On 1st November 2013, the proceedings in England were initiated by the father. An important issue, which had to be addressed, was the habitual resident of the child.
On 15th May 2014, HHJ Altman held that the English court had jurisdiction either under Article 8 or Article 12 of Brussels IIa.
An appeal was made. The appeal was allowed by the Court of Appeal. Sir James Munby noted that “LR is not, and has not, since at the latest April 2012, been habitually resident in this country” [12], and went on to hold:
“25 […] The question, as Baroness Hale explained in In re I (A Child) (Contact Application: Jurisdiction) (Centre for Family Law and Practice and another intervening) [2009] UHSC 10, [2010] 1 AC 319 , para 36, is whether it is in the child's interests for the case to be determined in the courts of this country rather than elsewhere. The judge's answer to that question is, in my judgment, unsupportable on his own reasoning. Everything points to it being in LR's best interests for her future to be decided locally, in the court of the country of her habitual residence and not in the court of a country where she has not lived since 2011. One must always sternly resist the temptation to compare cases on their facts, but I cannot help thinking that Holman J's analysis in B v B (Brussels II Revised: Jurisdiction) [2010] EWHC 1989 (Fam), [2011] 1 FLR 54 , paras 30-33, has a certain resonance here.
26 For all these reasons, this appeal must, in my judgment, be allowed. The order made by Judge Altman, declaring and ordering that the court has jurisdiction in accordance with BIIR, must be set aside. In its place we should declare, in accordance with BIIR, that the English court does not have jurisdiction to determine the father's application.” [25-26]