Kaja Viknes, assisted by Natalie Friday and Flavia Cretu, instructing Naomi Wiseman of 1KBW, represented the Applicant father in Person D v Person E [2024] EWHC 2626 (Fam).
The case concerned an application under the 1980 Hague Convention for the summary return of the parties’ five children to America.
After hearing oral evidence from both parties on the issue of consent, the President of the Family Division held that the Respondent mother’s defence of consent was not made out.
In his judgment, Sir Andrew McFarlane stated that the timetable and chronology were particularly important in this case, and that although the father may have been willing to consent to the mother going to the UK with the children in or around April 2023, subsequent events and his later actions were held to be ‘wholly incompatible with a man who was by then agreeing to the fact that she was about to go back permanently with the children to live in England.’
Read full judgment below.