http://ibnnews.org/nationalnews/high_court_quashes_family_court_order_for_abducted_
child_28308_9070633033587_0000.html
Friday, 28 March 2008
A boy allegedly abducted by his mother and brought to Australia will not be returned to live with his father in New Zealand, the High Court has ruled.
The Court ruled that the father's access order, granted in New Zealand in 2000, gave no right of veto over his son's removal from New Zealand.
The Court also held it had not been proven in previous appeals that the parents were in fact de facto partners, and that the NSW Department of Community Services, acting on behalf of its NZ counterpart, had therefore failed to establish the father was a guardian of his son, known as K, and therefore he could not determine where the child lived.
Under New Zealand law, a mother is a child's sole guardian if she was not married to or living with the father when a child was born.
K was brought to Australia in 2006 without the father's knowledge, despite the access order that the boy spend half of the school holidays and every second weekend with him.
Australia's Family Court ordered the mother, known as MW, to send K back to New Zealand to live with his father.
She lost an appeal to the full bench of the Family Court against that decision, and then appealed to the High Court, arguing the father did not have custody rights because she said they had never been a de facto couple.
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