Child Relocation Order Granted

Winning isn’t everything but wanting to win is – fighting to re-locate two children from South Africa to the United Kingdom.

 An Order was recently granted in the North Gauteng High Court in favour of a certain “Mr K”, who shall be referred to as such to preserve his anonymity. He was been represented by Ivan Zartz attorneys (IZA) since November 2013.

The case in point was a very interesting one whereby a divorced father who resides in South Africa with his two minor children, who were born in the United Kingdom and have United Kingdom passports, made an application to court to enable him to re-locate to the United Kingdom with the two children.

This application to court was necessary as Mr K’s ex-wife resides in Australia and has the two minor children’s British passports with her, and refused to hand over the passports to Mr K.  She also refused to allow the re-location of the children from South Africa to the United Kingdom. The Application specifically dealt with the granting of an order from the South African High Court allowing that new passports should be re- issued by the British embassy. The British authorities required an order of court as Mr K’s ex-wife would not give her consent with regard to new passports being issued and she refused to hand over the passports that are in her possession.

Due to Mr K’s ex-wife residing in Australia and her exact location being unknown to Mr K coupled with her refusal to supply such information to Mr K’s attorneys, an initial Application needed to be instituted in Court before IIZA could proceed with the main Application to have the new passports to be issued. The reason for the initial Application which is called an “Edictal Citation”, is that all the court documents which were prepared by IZA on behalf of Mr K needed to be delivered or “served” on Mr K’s ex-wife to promote the interests of justice and so she could know exactly what is happening with the court case, giving her a chance to defend herself or to oppose the matter. For this reason the edictal citation was required as the only contact detail IZA had for the ex-wife was an e-mail address of which IZA required special consent from the court to allow us to send her documents via e-mail.

The primary Application allowing the above edictal citation was heard in the North Gauteng High Court on the 15th of April 2014 and it was granted.  We then proceeded to send all the papers stating what we intended applying to court for.  The process towards trying to obtain the main Application for the new passports to be issued could now officially begin.

Obtaining a date for the matter to be heard before a Judge at court was of utmost importance as Mr K and the children had to be in the United Kingdom in early September. We were given a date of the 13th of August 2014 and on that date the order was granted after many consultations and a lot of paperwork.

Submitted by Fiona Fiebig, Candidate Attorney