Amdk v Na
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | Mr Justice Holman |
| Judgment Date | 06 March 2020 |
| Neutral Citation | [2020] EWHC 1548 (Fam) |
| Date | 06 March 2020 |
| Docket Number | Case No: FD19P00731 |
| Court | Family Division |
[2020] EWHC 1548 (Fam)
IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
FAMILY DIVISION
Royal Courts of Justice
Strand, London, WC2A 2LL
Mr Justice Holman
(sitting throughout in public)
Case No: FD19P00731
Ms Onyoja Momoh (instructed by OTS solicitors) for the applicant
Hearing date: 6 March 2020
(As approved by the judge)
This is an application for the recognition, pursuant to common law, of an adoption order made in Uganda. As I will later describe, the child concerned was found abandoned on the roadside in Uganda in 2014. Despite extensive enquiries and investigation in Uganda at the time, the genetic parents or wider family of that child have never been ascertained. Accordingly, there is no family respondent to the present application.
The avowed purpose of making this application is to enable the applicant adoptive mother, who is British, to be able to return to live in the United Kingdom, bringing the child with her.
Accordingly, the Secretary of State for the Home Department may have a real and legitimate interest in these proceedings. By an order made at the first directions hearing on 14 January 2020, Mrs Justice Judd ordered that the Secretary of State for the Home Department must be served with notice of these proceedings. Paragraph 2 of the order of Mrs Justice Judd provided that, “The applicant's solicitors shall, by 4 pm on 20 January 2020, serve the application and this order on the Secretary of State for the Home Department”. Paragraph 6 of the same order made absolutely clear that this application was listed for a final hearing here, at the Royal Courts of Justice, today, 6 March 2020, at 10.30 am, “at which the court will determine the issue of the recognition of a foreign adoption order (on submissions)”. Accordingly, that very order of 14 January 2020 made clear on its face the time and date and place of this final hearing. The order made further provision for the Secretary of State to file and serve a response to the application by 17 February 2020. She has not done so, but whether or not she had done so I would, of course, have heard anything that the Secretary of State may wish to say if she had attended or been represented here today. I have been supplied with three letters, dated 20 January 2020, 10 February 2020, and 17 February 2020, each of which were sent by the solicitors for the applicant to addresses of the Home Office in both Croydon and Sheffield. I have been informed that there was an additional letter sent earlier this week, on 2 March 2020, by recorded delivery, to each of those addresses. In short, no less than eight letters altogether have been sent by recorded delivery to the Secretary of State, giving notice of this application, and stage by stage updating the Secretary of State with further evidence as it was assembled in the form of the witness statement of the applicant and an expert's report as to Ugandan law. I have been informed, and accept, that recorded delivery receipts have been obtained which show that these letters were received and signed for at the respective addresses in Croydon and Sheffield. Further, I have been told today that this very morning there was in fact a telephone call from an official in the Home Office to the applicant's solicitors. The official appears to have made little reference to the hearing today, and his main concern was to enquire whether the child concerned is or is not currently in the United Kingdom. The answer is that she is not, for she remains in Uganda, although her mother, the applicant, is here and present in the court room, having flown over especially for this hearing.
In all those circumstances, I am quite satisfied that the Secretary of State has had ample notice of this application and these proceedings, and that the solicitors for the applicant have fully complied with the requirements of the order of Mrs Justice Judd of 14 January 2020. That being so, I propose to proceed with this application, notwithstanding that the Secretary of State for the Home Department is neither present nor represented. I stress that I do not infer from the non-engagement by the Secretary of State any particular position by her in relation to this application. I merely proceed with it on the basis of the evidence and material that has been supplied to me, and the cogent argument of the applicant's counsel, Ms Onyoja Momoh, in her written skeleton argument dated 5 March 2020.
It is very well established that this court has a jurisdiction at common law to recognise foreign adoptions, even though the country concerned does not fall within the international conventions and statutory schemes. Further, the proposition that foreign adoptions can be recognised outside the convention and any statutory schemes is clearly implicit in section 66(1)(e) of the Adoption and Children Act 2002.
The approach of this court on an application to recognise a foreign adoption, pursuant to the common law, was clearly established as long ago as 1965 by the Court of Appeal in Re Valentine's Settlement [1965] 1 Ch 831, and that authority has since been consistently followed and applied by the courts. For today's purposes it is not necessary to look any further than the most recent such authority, namely that of W v The Secretary of State for the Home Department [2017] EWHC 1733 (Fam), a decision of Mrs Justice Pauffley. In her judgment she summarised the legal framework, and at paragraph 14 helpfully set out in summary form the four criteria for recognition. These are, first, that the adoptive parent must have been domiciled in the relevant foreign country at the time of the foreign adoption; second, that the child must have been legally...
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