Description
He asked for a legal sanction to obtain permanent residence for his son in Australia. (Representative) The Karnataka High Court has allowed a 34-year-old woman to take her son to Australia and settle there without her ex-husband's consent. Judge M Nagaprasanna admitted the mother's plea under the Guardianships and Guardianships Act 1890 after the biological father failed to appear at court proceedings. Rakshitha sought legal sanction to obtain permanent residence for her son in Australia.
The petitioner, who resides in Australia, filed an action in the High Court against her first husband, CC Shashikumar, a farmer from Kunigal.
The couple married in 2006, and after the birth of their daughter, their relationship soured, ending in divorce. Both had filed for divorce with certain conditions.
One of the conditions of the petition was that the ex-husband would have visitation rights over the only child.
The woman filed a petition in the family court in 2022 for the relaxation of this clause because her ex-husband had not even visited the child for the last 8 years.
Since the boy's father did not respond to the court's summons, the court terminated the visitation rights.
The mother and child were living in Australia on an expiring tourist visa. Therefore, he sought to obtain a permanent visa to settle permanently in Australia.
Under the terms of the Australian government's migration regulations, the woman had to present legal custody of the child and written permission from the local court to remove the minor child from Indian jurisdiction.
The woman subsequently made a declaration to the Family Court seeking permission to take the child to Australia under section 26 of the Act.
However, the court rejected the request stating that a new application must be filed to seek custody of the child "as the Court becomes functus officio once the proceedings are closed." The woman then went to the grande instance court, which handed down a sentence on January 19, 2023.
In accepting the guilty plea, the court said it was appropriate to grant permission "to take the child beyond the shores of this nation, as requested in the application, solely to avoid the multiplicity of litigation that will eventually result in such an order because the husband has not challenged the case in any of the processes and the child in terms of commitment is already in the custody of the mother/wife/plaintiff.”
