Supreme Court steps into international custody dispute, giving lower courts more discretion

By Tierney Sneed and Ariane de Vogue, CNN

In an international child custody dispute, the Supreme Court said Wednesday that once a US court finds that returning an abducted child to the home country would subject the child to grave risk, courts are not required to consider whether there are some measures that can be taken to mitigate those risks.

The court wiped away a federal appeals court and sent a case concerning a child born in Italy back to the lower court for further proceedings.

The ruling is a win for an American woman who fled with her Italian-born child to the US after she said they faced abuse at the hands of her Italian-born husband. She sought to keep the child in the US while the custody proceedings played out. The husband filed a criminal kidnapping complaint against his wife in both Italian and American courts.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote the unanimous opinion of the court.

“As relevant here, a court is not bound to order a child’s return if it finds that return would put the child at a grave risk of physical or psychological harm,” Sotomayor wrote. “In such a circumstance, a court has discretion to determine whether to deny return.”

The ruling deals with the Hague Convention’s Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, which grants parents in general a “right of custody” and a separate “right of access,” ensuring that the laws of one country are respected in the other.

This story has been updated with additional information Wednesday.

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