F (A Child)

Judgment

Lord Justice Thorpe:

This is an application for permission to appeal on notice, with appeal to follow if permission granted. The order that we review is the order of Holman J of 5 February 2009 in proceedings brought under the Hague Convention of 1980 and the Brussels II Revised Regulation. The background history is helpfully set out by Mr Nicholas Anderson, who represents the Polish appellant father, in his skeleton argument. The parents are in their 30s, married in 1999 in Poland, and in that year and in that country their only child, Prezemyslaw, was born. He is, accordingly, now nine-and-a-half. The parents separated in Poland in 2005 and were divorced in Poland in 2006. The Polish proceedings provided for the future of Prezemyslaw and the respective rights of their parents, a process that culminated in an order in the Polish Court on 24 July for the father’s contact with Prezemyslaw to advance from sporadic ad hoc to alternate weekends staying contact. That order may have contributed to the mother’s exodus at the beginning of August. She and Prezemyslaw were travelling to Swansea, where her current Polish boyfriend was living. What were her real intentions at that stage are open to question, but she presents it as her decision to take a holiday in Swansea and to return with Prezemyslaw for the beginning of the Michaelmas term in Poland. However, that she clearly did not do, and the Polish Court was not notified of her whereabouts until a date in early 2008 which has not been ascertained.

It is the father’s case that he did not know of Prezemyslaw’s whereabouts until April 2008. It is established that, on 16 June, the London Central Authority received a request from the Warsaw Central Authority for the issue of an application under the Convention and the regulation. There is no doubt that the application was issued here on 24 June and a location order was made on the following day. The orders were served on the mother and clearly the location was no problem on 28 June and the first hearing was before Holman J on 1 July. The litigation chronology from issue on 24 June to trial on 4/5 February has been fully and clearly recorded by Mr Marcus Scott-Manderson QC, who represents the mother. The chronology is accepted by Mr Anderson as being accurate and fair. Anybody reading it will see that the inordinate delay was the consequence of the determination of the mother’s alternative complaints that the father had not been exercising rights of custo