N v N (Jurisdiction: Pre-nuptial agreement)
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judgment Date | 01 July 1999 |
| Date | 01 July 1999 |
| Court | Family Division |
Family Division
Before Mr Justice Wall
Jurisdiction - divorce - honouring pre-nuptial agreement
There was no jurisdiction to compel a Jewish husband to honour a pre-nuptial agreement to attend and comply with the instructions of the Beth Din, the Rabbinical Court, in the event of any matrimonial dispute; nor was an agreement recorded in a court order that he would progress the obtaining of a Get, a Jewish bill of divorce, expeditiously enforceable either by committal or specific performance.
However, in the same way that the court could properly decline to entertain an application for a decree absolute or for the wife's claims for ancillary relief to be dismissed, it would be open to the court to decline to hear the husband's application for contact until the agreement to obtain a Get, as recorded in a court order, had been honoured, provided that the refusal to entertain the husband's application was not contrary to the interest of the child.
Mr Justice Wall sitting in the Family Division so stated when dismissing a summons issued by the wife who, having obtained a decree absolute in June 1998, was seeking to compel the husband to co-operate in the steps necessary to progress the obtaining of a Get so that the parties, Orthodox Jews, could be divorced according to Jewish law also.
The hearing and judgment were in chambers but the case is reported with leave of the judge on the basis that the anonymity of the parties would be preserved.
Mr Jonathan Cohen, QC, for the wife; Mr David Burles for the husband.
MR JUSTICE WALL said that the parties, who married in March 1996 and separated in October 1997, had one child now aged two years.
The wife, having petitioned for divorce, obtained a decree absolute in June 1998 and in December 1998 each party's claim for ancillary relief was dismissed by consent.
Since then, in spite of his covenants in a pre-nuptial agreement, the husband had taken no steps to procure the writing of a Get; nor had he honoured his agreement, upon which a consent order for contact had been made by a district judge at a conciliation appointment in October 1998, to procure a Get expeditiously.
The English courts had long been aware that the consequences for a religious Jewish wife, if her husband refused to deliver a Get which she was willing to receive, were far more serious than they were for a husband whose wife refused the delivery of a Get.
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