The High Court has ruled that a three-year-old girl was not habitually resident in England and Wales, and it therefore did not have jurisdiction to determine her father’s application for her return from the UAE.
The girl’s mother was a citizen of Pakistan and her father held joint British and Pakistani citizenship. They had married in Pakistan in 2021 and subsequently spent time in England, Pakistan and the UAE. The girl was born in England in early 2023, her parents having agreed that she should be born here.
In February 2024, they had travelled to Pakistan for a family wedding. The father returned to England alone, with a Pakistani birth registration document in relation to the girl which the mother would have needed to take her out of the country. The mother claimed that he had abandoned her in Pakistan. The father claimed that they had arranged to travel to the airport separately, and he had flown back to England alone after the mother and the girl did not arrive, forgetting that he had the birth registration document. The girl subsequently lived with her mother in Pakistan and the UAE, after the mother was able to obtain a replacement birth registration document, and never returned to the UK.
In January 2026, the father issued proceedings seeking the girl’s return to the UK. He maintained that she remained habitually resident in England and Wales, while the mother argued that she was habitually resident in the UAE.
Ruling on the issue, the Court noted that, whether or not the father’s actions constituted abandonment, he had left the mother and the girl in Pakistan in a way which he had known would prevent them from returning to the UK. Those were not the actions of someone who considered his daughter to have been habitually resident in England and Wales at the time. The time he had taken to bring the application suggested that, for most of 2024 and 2025, he had taken the view that the girl had ‘moved on’ from the jurisdiction of England and Wales. He had applied to the courts in Pakistan for orders to place the girl into his care, making no mention of a desire for her to be returned to England and Wales.
The Court did not accept the father’s evidence that the parents had agreed that the girl would be raised in the UK. It also observed that the father’s case that the mother should have returned the girl to the UK amounted to a contention that she had failed to do something his actions had prevented her from doing.
The father was habitually resident in England and Wales, as were his parents and other family members. He had intended that the girl should be brought up here, and she was a British citizen. Those were significant factors linking her to this jurisdiction. By the time of the father’s application, however, it had been 22 months since she had last been in the UK. She was not registered in any pre-school or nursery, and had not received any healthcare here. Her mother had not set foot in the UK for the same length of time and no longer had a visa permitting her to reside here lawfully. The Court considered that it would be fanciful to conclude that by then the girl had remained habitually resident in England and Wales. It therefore lacked jurisdiction to determine the application.
