Lario Albarran | Hassling with the Hague Convention: Part II

BACKGROUND

Michelle Monasky, a U.S. citizen, married to Domenico Taglieri, an Italian citizen, faced repeated domestic abuse and assault before and during her pregnancy. After Monasky returned to the United States with her and Taglieri’s two-month-old daughter, Taglieri filed a petition under the Hague Convention seeking the daughter’s return to Italy. The court granted Taglieri’s petition, finding that Italy was the baby’s habitual residence.

Monasky sought a stay of the return order, which was denied first by the Sixth Circuit and then by the Supreme Court. Therefore, the daughter was returned to Italy, where an Italian court in an ex parte proceeding had terminated Monasky’s parental rights and made Taglieri “sole custodian with full parental rights” over the daughter.

After a panel of the Sixth Circuit affirmed the district court’s decision, the Sixth Circuit agreed to a rehearing en banc. Applying a different standard than the district court, the Sixth Circuit majority held in Taglieri v. Monasky (2018) that “the parents’ shared intent” determines whether an infant, who is too young to acclimate to her surroundings, has attained a habitual residence in the country from which she was removed. The majority went on to hold that “shared parental intent” does not require the parents to have a “meeting of the minds’ about their child’s future home.” According to the majority, “[a]n absence of a subjective agreement between the parents does not by itself end the inquiry” because a subjective agreement, while sufficient, is “not a necessary…basis for locating an infant’s habitual residence.”

Even though the Sixth Circuit had not previously adopted a “shared parental intent” standard to determine the habitual residence of infants—and even though a remand is normally “required” when the Sixth Circuit adopts a different legal standard than that applied by the district court—the en banc majority declined to remand the case for the district court to apply its new standard to the facts of this case. 

THE ISSUE

When an infant is too young to acclimate to her surroundings, is a subjective agreement between the infant’s parents necessary to establish her habitual residence under the Hague Convention?

THE SPLIT

The Second, Third, Fifth, and Ninth Circuits have addressed the question of how to determine habitual residence for infants too young to acclimate to their surroundings. Each concluded that habitual residence is established only if the parents shared a subjective intent—meaning if they reached a meeting of the minds—to raise the child in that country. 

The Second Circuit held in Gitter v. Gitter (2005), that absent evidence that a child had acclimated to her surroundings, “a child’s habitual residence is consistent with the intentions of those entitled to fix the child’s residence at the time those intentions were mutually shared.” Applying that standard, the court concluded that because the parents “only mutually agreed to move to Israel on a conditional basis,” their child could only have attained habitual residence in Israel through acclimatization. 

Likewise, the Third Circuit explained in Feder v. Evans-Feder (1995) that “the conduct and the overtly stated intentions and agreement of the parents . . . are bound to be important factors” in assessing a child’s habitual residence. With that standard in mind, the Third Circuit further held in Delvoye v. Lee (2003) that when the mother of an eight-week-old infant agreed to give birth in Belgium but to “live there only temporarily,” the infant “did not become a habitual resident” of Belgium before her mother took her to the United States.

The Fifth Circuit similarly held in Berezowsky v. Ojeda (2014), that, to establish a habitual residence, “[a] shared parental intent requires that the parents actually share or jointly develop the intention.” The court went on to explain that, “[i]n other words the parents must reach some sort of meeting of the minds regarding their child’s habitual residence, so that they are making the decision together.” The court concluded that the petitioner did not meet her burden of establishing that the parents “reach[ed] an agreement or meeting of the minds regarding [their child’s] future” and that the petitioner, therefore, was not entitled to an order returning the child to Mexico.

The Ninth Circuit follows the same approach. In Murphy v. Sloan (2014), the court declined to find a child habitually resident in Ireland because “there was never any discussion, let alone agreement, that the stay abroad would be indefinite.”

With Taglieri (2018), the Sixth Circuit took an entirely different approach to ascertain shared parental intent in this case. According to the en banc majority, a “meeting of the minds” between the parents is “not a necessary . . . basis for locating an infant’s habitual residence.” The court reasoned that this lack of subjective agreement “does not by itself end the inquiry.” Under that approach, the en banc majority upheld the return order—even though the district court made no finding that Monasky and Taglieri had ever agreed to raise their daughter in Italy. 

LOOKING FORWARD

If any of the four other circuits to address the issue had decided Taglieri v.  Monasky, the absence of any actual agreement between Monasky and Taglieri—as well as the undisputed fact that the eight week-old had not acclimated to her surroundings in Italy—would have led the court to conclude that the daughter was not habitually resident in Italy and that a return order was not appropriate. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments for this case on December 11, 2019, and we await its decision.