Opinion ID: 1202823
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 7

Heading: The Greek Court's Hague Determination

Text: The district court properly extended comity to the Greek court's decision unless, as discussed above, that decision clearly misinterpreted the Hague Convention, departed from the Convention's fundamental premises, or failed to meet a minimum standard of reasonableness. As noted in our discussion of the standard of review above, we assume that the district court determined that comity required it to accept the Greek court's resolution of certain issues in Petroutsas' petition as binding on its own resolution of Asvesta's petition. Although it is not clear from the district court's ruling, the briefing of the parties, both before the district court and before us, [15] suggests that the district court determined that principles of comity required it to find that the child's habitual residence was Greece and that Petroutsas therefore had removed the child in violation of the custody rights that the Greek courts had granted to Asvesta. The district court, however, did not identify the specific Greek court rulings to which it extended comity and upon which it relied in ruling that Greece was the child's habitual residence. [16] The Greek court, though, denied Petroutsas' petition on the basis of several grounds: (1) the mother's removal and retention of the child in Greece was not illegal; (2) Petroutsas consented to the child's move to and stay in Greece, (3) Petroutsas was not exercising his right of custody of the child at the time of the removal; and (4) the child's separation from Asvesta if returned to the United States would pose a grave risk of harm to the child. Because the particular ground or grounds upon which the district court relied are not clear, we consider each ground relied upon by the Greek court, as well as the Greek court's decision as a whole, in order to determine whether the district court's extension of comity was proper. 1. The Greek Court's Overall Hague Convention Analysis We begin by observing that the overall structure and focus of the Greek court's analysis deviates from the approach set forth in the Convention. First, the Convention is clear that a court considering a Hague petition should not consider matters relevant to the merits of the underlying custody dispute such as the best interests of the child, as these considerations are reserved for the courts of the child's habitual residence. See Pérez-Vera Report, at 430, ¶ 19. The Convention instead requires courts to perform more objective inquiries, such as the determination of the child's habitual residence and whether the child was wrongfully removed or retained. Here, the Greek court strayed from the objective inquiries prescribed by the Convention and focused on matters largely irrelevant to its ultimate decision. Much, if not most, of the court's factual findings center on the breakdown of the couple's relationship and Petroutsas' treatment of Asvesta, including his alleged infidelity, failure to be the sole bread-winner for the family, and refusal to speak to Asvesta in the last months of their marriage. See App. at 54-56. The Greek court noted several incidents between Asvesta and Petroutsas in which the child may have been involved, including situations in which Petroutsas made bad scenes before the eyes of the minor and threatened Asvesta that she would never see the child again. App. at 55, 56. Although these incidents could be relevant to the Greek court's analysis of the grave risk exception under Article 13 of the Convention, the court's vague factual findings do not indicate how the child, not yet a year old at the time, would have been affected by the incidents. While Asvesta may have experienced trying circumstances in her marriage to Petroutsas, these circumstances are not the proper focus of a Hague Convention inquiry. Further, the Greek court's analysis is largely untethered from the relatively structured inquiry required by the Hague Convention. Although the court determined, in a conclusory fashion, that Asvesta's removal of the child to Greece was not illegal, it is unclear whether this constituted a determination under Article 3 that the removal or retention was not wrongful, or whether the Greek court skipped the Article 3 determination and relied solely on Article 13 exceptions to return to justify its denial of Petroutsas' petition. The Greek court's finding that Petroutsas failed to exercise his custodial rights at the time of removal was the only element of the Article 3 inquiry that the court addressed in its decision. That determination, however, could have served either as a basis for finding that Asvesta's removal of the child was not wrongful under Article 3(b) or as an exception to return under Article 13(a). [17] While we understand that our concerns with the clarity of the Greek court's analysis may result from translation errors or differences between Greek and American analytical styles, we believe our concerns are warranted in light of the Hague Convention's straightforward analytical framework and its clear focus on objective inquiries such as the determination of wrongful removal under Article 3. The overall lack of clarity and improper focus of the Greek court's ruling provides a disturbing backdrop to each of the various grounds the Greek court ultimately relied upon to deny Petroutsas' petition. 2. Article 3: Wrongful Retention As discussed above, we assume that the Greek court denied Petroutsas' petition because, in part, he failed to show that he was exercising his custodial rights to the child at the time of removal and therefore could not establish that Asvesta had wrongfully retained the child in Greece. Article 3 of the Convention provides that a petitioning party can demonstrate wrongful retention only when the retention of the child is in breach of the petitioning party's custodial rights under the law of the child's habitual residence and, at the time of retention, the petitioning party was exercising those rights. Here, the Greek court's Article 3 ruling was marked by serious defects, principally, its failure to make the underlying determination of the child's habitual residence, and also its legally erroneous and factually unsupported finding that Petroutsas failed to exercise his custody rights. First, the Greek court completely failed to determine the child's habitual residence in its Hague Convention analysis, even though the resolution of this issue is central to a court's Article 3 inquiry and is perhaps the most important inquiry under the Convention. Asvesta's arguments that the Greek Hague court did make such a determination are without foundation. Although the Greek court made factual findings that may have been relevant to a habitual residence determination, the Greek court never concluded that Greece, rather than the United States, was the child's habitual residence; in fact, it never mentioned the term habitual residence in its analysis. Notably, had the Greek court determined that Greece was the child's habitual residence, such a determination would have obviated the need to make an Article 3 determination, as the Convention would not have required the court to return the child to California if it was not the child's habitual residence. The Greek court's failure to determine the child's habitual residence greatly undermines its wrongful retention analysis. In Mozes, we emphasized that `[h]abitual residence' is the centraloften outcome-determinative concept on which the entire system is founded. See 239 F.3d at 1072. The identification of the child's habitual residence is crucial to a Hague inquiry because [t]he relevant custody rights are those recognized by the State of habitual residence, and it is the State of habitual residence to which the child should be returned and where the ultimate merits of the custody fight are to be decided. Linda Silberman, Hague Convention on International Child Abduction: A Brief Overview and Case Law Analysis, 28 Fam. L.Q. 9, 20 (1994). In particular, the habitual residence determination is central to a court's wrongful removal inquiry under Article 3, because the law of the habitual residence is used to determine whether the petitioning party has custody rights to the child, whether those rights have been violated by the removal or retention of the child, and arguably, whether those rights were sufficiently exercised by the petitioning party at the time of the removal. See Friedrich II, 78 F.3d at 1065 (noting that American courts are not well suited to determine the consequences of parental behavior under the law of a foreign country and observing the difficulty of the task of deciding, prior to a ruling by a court in the abducted-from country, if a parent's custody rights should be ignored because he or she was not acting sufficiently like a custodial parent). The Greek court's failure to make a habitual residence determination consequently casts doubt on its entire Article 3 determination. Without knowing whether the habitual residence of the child was the United States or Greece, the court could not have known the appropriate law to apply in determining whether Petroutsas had custodial rights to the child, whether he was exercising those rights, or whether Asvesta had violated his rights by removing and retaining the child in Greece. In addition to the Greek court's failure to address the key question of habitual residence, its stated basis for determining that Asvesta's actions were not wrongful under Article 3 was its finding that Petroutsas was, at the time of the removal, indifferent to his family obligations, ... not engaged in the minor's care, and was indifferent to his psychosomatic [sic] development. App. at 58. We have difficulty, however, in discerning the evidentiary basis for this finding. Other than the court's finding that Petroutsas was making bad scenes before the eyes of the minor, App. at 55, the Greek court made no factual findings regarding Petroutsas' lack of care for the child, but rather focused on Petroutsas' treatment of Asvesta. While Petroutsas may not have treated Asvesta as he should have, his behavior toward her does not bear directly on his treatment of the child or his exercise of his custodial rights. The lack of appropriate factual findings on Petroutsas' failure to exercise his custody rights is even more concerning when the Greek court's reasoning is considered in light of the minimal showing that is required under Article 3(b). Pérez-Vera notes that Article 3(b) requires that the applicant provide only some preliminary evidence that he actually took physical care of the child, a fact which normally will be relatively easy to demonstrate. Pérez-Vera Report at 448-49, ¶ 73 (observing that because Article 13(b), which provides an exception or defense to return, requires the non-petitioning person to show that the petitioning parent was not exercising custodial rights, we may conclude that the Convention, taken as a whole, is built upon the tacit presumption that the person who has care of the child actually exercises custody over it.). Indeed, we and other courts have held that a petitioner's burden under Article 3(b) is minimal. For example, in Mozes, we determined that the petitioning father had been exercising his parental rights and responsibilities up until the time [the mother] sought custody. 239 F.3d at 1085. There, the father had remained in regular contact with his family, visited them several times, and `provided all finances needed to support his wife and children in California.' Id. (quoting Mozes, 19 F.Supp.2d 1108, 1111 (C.D.Cal. 1998)). Nothing in the record suggests that Petroutsas' conduct toward the child here did not rise to the same level of care. The Sixth Circuit in Friedrich II explained that requiring a petitioning party to meet a high bar in demonstrating the actual exercise of custody rights contradicted the Convention's objective to reserve custody determinations for the country of habitual residence. 78 F.3d at 1065. Friedrich II held that if a person has valid custody rights to a child under the law of the country of the child's habitual residence, that person cannot fail to exercise those custody rights under the Hague Convention short of acts that constitute clear and unequivocal abandonment of the child. Once it determines that the parent exercised custody rights in any manner, the court should stopcompletely avoiding the question whether the parent exercised the custody rights well or badly. Id. at 1066. In justifying this approach, the court explained that a foreign court's decision about the adequacy of one parent's exercise of custody rights is dangerously close to ... the merits of the custody dispute and that foreign courts are not well-suited to determine if a parent's custody rights should be ignored because he or she was not acting sufficiently like a custodial parent. Id. Here, the Greek court's analysis of whether Petroutsas exercised his custody rights goes beyond the threshold determination required by the Convention and, in doing so, delves into matters more appropriately reserved for the courts of the child's habitual residence. The Greek court's Article 3 determination is thus marked by numerous flaws, most notably, the court's complete failure to address a key provision of the Convention a failure that tainted its wrongful retention analysis as a whole. We therefore conclude that the Greek court's wrongful retention determination resulted from a clear misapplication of the provisions of the Hague Convention. 3. Article 13(a): Consent The Greek court also denied Petroutsas' petition on the basis of its finding that Petroutsas consented to the child's removal and stay in Greece. [18] Under Article 13(a), a contracting nation is not bound to order the return of the child if the person ... which opposes its return establishes that the person ... having the care of the person of the child ... had consented to or subsequently acquiesced in the removal or retention. Two pieces of evidence provided the basis for the Greek court's conclusion that Petroutsas consented: (1) a statement in the November 2, 2005, e-mail from Petroutsas to Asvesta, Go to Greece with the child and we will see how I will come to Greece to visit him, and (2) a later writing, notarized on November 11, 2005, in which Petroutsas gave permission to Asvesta to travel with the child from November 8, 2005, to December 8, 2005. We conclude that the Greek court's factual determination is completely unsupported, and is indeed contradicted by, this evidence. First, the statement in the November 2 e-mail does not unequivocally demonstrate that Petroutsas consented to the child's indefinite stay in Greece. The statement could be read to express consent either for the child to travel to Greece temporarily or for the child to move to Greece permanently. Read in the context of the entire e-mail, in which Petroutsas pleads for Asvesta to stay in the United States for the time being, it seems more plausible that Petroutsas did not consent to the child's indefinite or permanent relocation to Greece. Further, Petroutsas' later written consent for Asvesta to travel with the child directly contradicts the Greek court's finding of that Petroutsas consented to the child's indefinite stay in Greece. In that writing, Petroutsas specified the time during which he consented to Asvesta traveling with their son: between November 8, 2005, and December 8, 2005. Petroutsas filed his Hague petition in Greece for the return of the child well after this time period elapsed. The Greek court's apparent dismissal of this evidence in favor of the earlier e-mail was unwarranted, because Petroutsas' explicit consent for Asvesta to travel with their son for a finite period of time occurred later in time and closer in proximity to Asvesta's removal and retention of the child in Greece than the earlier and more vague November 2 e-mail. Finally, for the Greek court to conclude that Petroutsas gave consent for purposes of Article 13(a), it also had to determine that Petroutsas gave consent as a person having the care of the person of the child at the time of the removal or retention. The Greek court's consent determination, therefore, is arguably at odds with its determination that Petroutsas was not exercising his right of custody at the time of Asvesta's removal or retention of the child. See Pérez-Vera Report at 448-49, ¶ 73 (noting that Article 3(b) requires that the applicant provide only some preliminary evidence that he actually took physical care of the child in order to show the exercise of custodial rights). Although we are reluctant to disregard the factual findings of a foreign court, the lack of evidentiary support for the Greek court's finding of consent renders its Article 13(a) determination unreasonable. 4. Article 13(b): Grave Risk of Harm We turn finally to the Greek court's third ground for denying Petroutsas' petitionits determination that the child would face a grave risk of harm if he were returned to the United States. Specifically, the Greek court found that the child faced a severe danger that [his] return to the USA to [sic] expose him to mental tribulation, since he will be deprived of his mother's presence, affection, love and care at the delicate age of 12 months, he will be deprived of the security and stability that he feels near his mother and his mental bond with her will be broken. App. at 58. This determination was made, apparently, pursuant to Article 13(b)'s exception to the return of the child where there is a grave risk that his or her return would expose the child to physical or psychological harm or otherwise place the child in an intolerable situation. Again, we find the Greek court's determination to be wholly unsupported. First, the Greek court, in reaching this conclusion, determinedor assumedthat the child's separation from his mother at a young age would be more traumatic than his separation from his father. In doing so, the Greek court stepped out of its role as a Hague Convention tribunal by inquiring into the best interests of the child. Although we express no views on the wisdom of such a determination, it is a determination pertinent only to the merits of the underlying custody dispute which must be resolved not by a Hague court, but rather the courts of the child's habitual residence. Further, the Greek Hague court's determination that the child faced a grave risk of harm if returned to the United States relied on an impermissibly broad interpretation of Article 13(b). United States courts have consistently recognized that, like the other exceptions to return of a child under the Convention, Article 13(b)'s exception for grave risk should be narrowly drawn. In re Adan, 437 F.3d 381, 395 (3d Cir.2006) (citing Feder, 63 F.3d at 226); see also Blondin, 189 F.3d at 246; Blondin v. Dubois, 238 F.3d 153, 162 (2d Cir.2001) (observing that grave risk of harm arises in situations in which the child faces a real risk of being hurt, physically or psychologically, as a result of repatriation). Courts of other contracting nations have also adopted a narrow view of Article 13(b)'s grave risk exception. See Friedrich II, 78 F.3d at 1068. For example, the Supreme Court of Canada held in Thomson v. Thomson, [1994] 3 S.C.R. 551, that a petitioner may demonstrate grave risk of harm only when the harm amounts to an intolerable situation. In the United Kingdom, the parent opposing return must show harm that is something greater than would normally be expected on taking a child away from one parent and passing him to another. In re A., [1988] F.L.R. 365, 372. In Diorinou, as previously noted, the Second Circuit reviewed the reasoning of a Greek court decision that based an Article 13(b) determination on reasoning similar to that employed by the Greek court in this case. The Greek court had stated that if the children were forced to leave their mother, there would be grave danger of exposing them to psychological harm and place them in an intolerable situation. 237 F.3d at 144 (internal quotation marks omitted). Although the Second Circuit ultimately extended comity to the Greek court's decision on the strength of its Article 3 determination, our sister circuit emphasized that it was dubious about the Greek court's reasoning, noting that Article 13(b) was to be narrowly construed to preclude return only in extreme circumstances. Id. at 145 (citing Friedrich I, 73 F.3d at 1068-69). Here, as in Diorinou, the Greek court failed to support its conclusion with evidence that the child, if returned to the United States, would have experienced something greater than would normally be expected on taking a child away from one parent and passing him to another. In re A., [1988] F.L.R. 365, 372. Although the Greek court opined that the child would suffer more trauma as a result of his young age, allowing an exception to return in cases involving young children wrongfully removed or retained by their mothers would swallow the Convention's rule of return. By basing its analysis largely on matters properly reserved for the courts of the child's habitual residence and by construing Article 13(b)'s grave risk exception so broadly, the Greek court's Article 13(b) determination contravened the intent of the Convention's drafters. As a result, this determination cannot properly support the Greek court's denial of Petroutsas's petition.