Abstract
The Utrecht Law Review is an open-access peer-reviewed journal which aims to offer an international academic platform for cross-border legal research. In the first place, this concerns research in which the boundaries of the classic branches of the law (private law, criminal law, constitutional and administrative law, European and public international law) are crossed and connections are made between these areas of the law, amongst others from a comparative law perspective. In addition, the journal welcomes research in which classic law is brought face to face with not strictly legal disciplines such as philosophy, economics, political sciences and public administration science.The journal was established in 2005 and is affiliated to the Utrecht University School of Law. If you wish to receive e-mail alerts please join the mailing list.
Highlights
In a debate in the Dutch Parliament in April 2009 on international child abduction, the Minister of Justice Hirsch Ballin stated that ‘international traffic and certainly international love traffic has increased in the last decades’.1 He seemed to imply that because of this increase, transnational love problems in divorce, maintenance issues, visitation rights, custody over children, and cases of child abduction were here to stay for some time
‘I have talked this over with the court clerk and we thought it important to keep the case in our hands, that is to decide this case even when the boy had been in Morocco for over a year, and to decide that Dutch law was applicable. We believed that it would be better for the child if we looked at the case from the perspective of Dutch law, because we know that when we apply Moroccan law, which would have been possible according to private international law, the mother does not have a leg to stand on
Apart from the formal yearly and other conferences and the Malta Conferences organised by the Hague Convention, liaison judges for example have meetings with Moroccan judges invited by the Dutch Association for the Judiciary, and accept invitations by an Egyptian court for an exchange of views and lectures on legal developments
Summary
Rachida’s husband Aziz took his family for a vacation in Morocco, but he had planned to leave them there. The construction is based on some hard facts like the family staying in Morocco and Aziz not showing up at the Board, and on guesswork, preconceptions about abduction and the legal role of men and women in Islamic/Moroccan social relations This construction of the facts or rather ‘the story of Rachida as legally constructed’ is connected to the standard interpretation of what is in the interest of children. Many Islamic countries have not ratified the HC because of the gender equality of fathers and mothers with regard to custody rights.[40] In concrete cases this may mean that a Moroccan man who abducted his children in the Netherlands and took them to Morocco after divorce, is legally allowed and may even be obliged to do this when his divorced wife remarries or does not raise the children in the proper Islamic way. I have made clear that their behaviour is related to the different legal cultural interpretations that are best termed as the dominant modern interpretation versus its Islamic equivalent
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