As a family judge, I regularly tried international family cases, so I entirely agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, and the noble Lord, Lord Marks, and very much support Amendment 29. I am dismayed, I have to say, by the inadequacy of the current wording of the Bill, which does not refer specifically to family law and does not deal with the main issue of reciprocity and the importance of the European court in Luxembourg. I will reiterate two figures because they are important for noble Lords to know. One is that there are 140,000 EU divorces between the UK and other member states. That is not a small number. There are 1,800 EU child abduction cases—an area of the law that I spent a disproportionate amount of my time trying under the Hague convention before the EU law came in and enormously improved the Hague convention.
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Both noble Lords referred to the three main procedural areas: jurisdiction, recognition and enforcement, and co-operation. We do not want parallel hearings. We do not want someone starting a divorce in London and in Warsaw and carrying it through to the end, where we may find that we have to obey what Warsaw says and Warsaw has absolutely no need to take the slightest notice of us. This is a truly worrying thing. When it comes to the recognition and enforcement of orders, it is incredibly important that a domestic violence order in this country will be applied in another country, where the offender is living, and if the victim goes to, say, Slovenia and the offender misbehaves, the Slovenian courts will apply our English domestic violence injunction. That will no longer be the case under the Bill.
The other important thing is co-operation. Again, I come back to child abduction, which is perhaps the saddest of all the areas of international family law, when the child is removed precipitately from one parent and taken somewhere else. Currently, if there is an English order the EU country where the person is will try to find him—very often him but sometimes her—and then apply the English court order. That is such a bonus that we have and it is more efficient because it is stricter than the Hague convention of 1980.
The Bill applies to replicating existing law but, as the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, and the noble Lord, Lord Marks, pointed out, it does nothing about the changes that are going through at the moment. There is really no point in our replicating laws that are about to be changed because they will not then apply in the rest of Europe.
That is the first problem but the second and infinitely more important problem is reciprocity. There is no point us applying European law if the various countries
of Europe do not have to apply ours. That really will be such a disadvantage for British citizens. This matter that noble Lords are currently looking at is nothing to do with the rights of EU citizens. It is exclusively, from our point of view, the opportunity for fairness and justice for the British citizens involved in international family affairs, so we urgently need certainty for family cases.
We also have to bear in mind that, unlike most of the law discussed here, where I can understand the issue of sovereignty—I do not actually agree with it but I can understand people’s feelings about sovereignty on substantive law—what we are talking about is not substantive, it is procedural. I would have thought it would be much easier to accept the European court decisions on procedure than on substantive law. But we really must have the European court if we are to have reciprocity with the other 27 countries—entirely for the benefit of British citizens, although clearly it would also benefit the citizens of the other 27 countries.
Would the Minister be prepared to see me along with a number of others, particularly the Family Law Bar Association, the international family law association and Resolution, the organisation for solicitors in family law, so that we could go through with him how we ought to take the Bill forward? Currently, the way civil law is being looked at just for replicating it is utterly inadequate. It would be profoundly unjust to British people to let it stay like that.