ABU-JAUDEH v. ABU-JAUDEH

JUDGMENT OF KINGSLEY-NYINAH J.A.

On 28 August 1954, the principal parties to this suit were joined together in matrimony at the Deputy Registrar's Office, Kumasi Municipal Council, Kumasi, as husband and wife. Fourteen years subsequently, and exactly two grown-up children later, the husband disillusioned and bewildered, instituted proceedings against his wife and another man (the co-respondent) on 12 March 1968 asking for a dissolution of their marriage on the serious grounds of cruelty and adultery.

From the violence of the allegations canvassed by husband and wife against each other in their separate pleadings, it is easy to infer that that love which at the start was so warm, so tender and so beautiful, and which drew husband and wife together into wedlock-that love has now completely soured and is dishonoured, tarnishing the alluring glamour of earlier years.

The embers of their earlier love having now so completely died out without the slightest hope of a rekindling towards meaningful reconciliation, one would have thought that both parties would have pressed for an expeditious loosening of the bonds of their hapless marriage so as to be able to enjoy the freedom they seem so much, now, to desire and which, I think, will do both of them tremendous good. Instead, however, the wife respondent has stymied the main action for divorce by raising the issue of jurisdiction as a bar to her husband's suit being heard and determined in these courts here in Ghana. Her main ground is that the petitioner, her husband, is not truly and sufficiently domiciled in Ghana to avail himself of this country's matrimonial jurisdiction in a suit for divorce.

Although the raising of this preliminary point appears, at first view, to have been engineered to delay, unnecessarily, the hearing and determination of the main and substantive action for divorce, I would say that the objection was properly taken because the validity of a decree of divorce is determined by the law of the domicile of the contesting spouses. In Le Mesurier v. Le Mesurier [1895-1899] All E.R. Rep. 836, P.C. it was held as summarised in the headnote that:

"According to international law the domicil for the time being of married persons affords the only true jurisdiction to dissolve their marriage. Such jurisdiction is not conferred by a `matrimonial domicil' based on a residence which, though not `casual or that of a traveller,' is not of sufficient permanence to enable the parties to acquire a tru