de Facto Family in UK Law

Nor, in my view, can an adult man and woman who establish a platonic relationship establish a familial nexus by acting as a devoted brother and sister or father and daughter would act, even if they address each other as such and even if they refer to each other as such and regard their association as tantamount to such. Nor, in my view, would they indeed be recognised as familial links by the ordinary man".

The hall marks of the relationship were essentially that there should be a degree of mutual inter-dependence, of the sharing of lives, of caring and love, of commitment and support. In respect of legal relationships these are presumed, though evidently are not always present as the family law and criminal courts know only too well. In de facto relationships these are capable, if proved, of creating membership of the tenant's family.

The right to receive a copy of Form C6A is not limited to those who are able to establish that they are entitled to the protection of Article 8. The right to receive a copy of Form C6A exists for the benefit of every father whom a local authority 'believes to be a parent without parental responsibility for the child' irrespective of whether or not that parent has de facto family ties.

The test has to be whether the relationship of the appellant to the deceased was one where there is at least a broadly recognisable de facto familial nexus. I would not define that familial nexus in terms of its structures or components: I would rather focus on familial functions. The question is more what a family does rather than what a family is. A family unit is a social organisation which functions through its linking its members closely together.

If it looks like a marriage in the old and perhaps obsolete sense of a lifelong union, with nothing casual or temporary about it, it is a family until the House of Lords declares (as Mr. Semken reserves his right to ask them to declare) that Dyson v. Fox's case was wrongly decided because the reasoning of the majority was wrong. The time has gone bywhen the courts can hold such a union not to be 'familial' simply because the parties to it do not pretend to be married in due form of law.

Do these documents establish or evidence an obligation of customary international law that is positively protective of de facto adopted children? Whilst there is a perceptible concern that the concept of family, in the context of family reunion, should not be resistant to social and cultural change, I do not consider that there is a precise, identifiable obligation of customary international law that is prescriptive of the national approach to de facto adoption.

The Strasbourg case law recognises that in some instances family life arises ipso jure. That is so in the case of a lawful and genuine marriage, both in respect of the relationship between husband and wife and also (see the passage in Berrehab v The Netherlands at para [21] that I quoted in paragraph [58] above) the relationship between the parents and their children. The same principle applies in relation to the children of de facto unions.