The High Court has ensured that cross-border families should not be left in legal limbo because of the UK’s exit from the European Framework.
Facts:
In 2006, the mother, an Irish national, and the father, a British national, shared a brief relationship that resulted in the birth of their child, V, in 2007. Following V’s birth, the mother and father had no further contact. The mother returned to the Republic of Ireland to raise V as a single parent, while the father remained in England, later claiming that he had no memory of the mother and was unaware of the child’s existence until 2019. In January 2019, the mother located the father on social media and notified him of their child, who was by then twelve years old.
Following this contact, the mother initiated a formal cross-border request for child maintenance through the Irish Central Authority in August 2019 under the EU Maintenance Regulation 4/2009. This application was transmitted to the UK’s Central Authority in September 2019, but suffered from extreme administrative and procedural delays, in part because the mother had been wrongly advised by various agencies that she was not entitled to legal aid for the proceedings.
The litigation spanned over five years and involved fourteen separate hearings, while the father consistently obstructed the process by failing to attend court dates and refusing to provide financial disclosure. Although DNA testing eventually confirmed paternity in 2022, the father continued to challenge the results and restructured his finances—transferring 99% of his property interests to his wife—in a bid to claim that he had no income or assets.
The mother, acting without a lawyer, attempted to comply with complex case management directions by emailing bank statements, school reports, and medical records to the Court and the father. However, at a final hearing in March 2025, a
District Judge summarily dismissed her claim, concluding that the mother had failed to comply with court orders and that the Court lacked jurisdiction because of the UK’s departure from the EU. The mother appealed the dismissal to the High Court.
Decision:
The High Court held that the Family Court did indeed have jurisdiction, notwithstanding the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, and that the application had been wrongly dismissed for alleged non-compliance. The most significant legal error corrected by the High Court was the District Judge’s belief that the Court had effectively lost the power to create a new maintenance order after Brexit. Under Article 67 of the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) 2019, any proceedings started before the end of the transition period (31 December 2020) continue to be governed by the EU Maintenance Regulation.
Even if there had been minor breaches, dismissing a five-year-old claim was disproportionate under FPR 1.1 (The Overriding Objective). This was especially true given that the mother was a litigant in person who had been wrongly denied legal aid.
The District Judge had blamed the mother for the five-year delay while ignoring the father’s refusal to attend hearings, his failure to provide disclosure for years, and his non-payment of court-ordered costs.
Implications:
This case confirms that, for any maintenance application initiated through a central authority before 31 December 2020, the old EU Maintenance Regulation remains the governing law. Thus, the courts cannot refuse to create a new maintenance order simply because the UK has left the EU. If the case was “seised” (started) during the transition period, the full suite of EU powers—including creating an order where none exists—is preserved by the WA.
The judgement also serves as an illustration of the serious practical difficulties faced by litigants in cross-border maintenance cases and the extent to which those difficulties can undermine the reasonable objectives of international child maintenance regimes.
A major implication is the reinforcement of the “mandatory” nature of legal aid in these specific cases. Under Schedule 1 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act (LASPO) 2012, an applicant seeking to establish or enforce maintenance via a central authority is entitled to legal aid.
