Habitual Residence: Review of Developments and Proposed Guidelines

The 1980 Child Abduction Convention is aimed at addressing the increasingly disturbing problem of trans-border parental child abduction, its key mechanism being to promptly return an abducted child to his or her country of ‘habitual residence.’ In essence, habitual residence is established as the chosen personal connecting factor in international child abduction cases. However, in view of the failure of the Convention to define the term, it has become the responsibility of the courts around the world to improvise their own standards for the determination. The objectives of the present paper, therefore, are to assess the deplorable situation of fragmented approaches and standards used by the courts in determining habitual residence of a child and to explore the recent developments in judicial pronouncements in order to be able to demonstrate the changing trend in the jurisprudence of the courts. To achieve these, the paper looks into and appraises the decisions of the courts of the United States of America, Canada, the European Union, the United Kingdom and other common law countries. The paper concludes that the changing trend is clearly discernible and a number of courts of States parties are increasingly applying a hybrid or combined approach rather than various subjective and one-sided approaches and thus moving towards the achievement of harmonization in the determination of a child’s habitual residence, the underlying principle of the Convention.

Intercountry child abduction cases present a colossal challenge for the courts in determining courses of action. The Hague Convention on Civil Aspects of Child Abduction, 1980, provides for the mechanism of prompt “return of the child” to the “habitual residence”. The assumption is that the courts of habitual residence of the child are the best forum to promote the child’s best interests. “Welfare of the child” or “best interest of the child” are the guiding principles recognized by international law as the basis for child jurisprudence. However, India is not a signatory to the Hague Convention, which poses a significant challenge to applying orders of foreign courts relating to the custody and return of a child abducted to India. Considering the large diaspora and increasing cross border marriages, the issue of child abduction and the legal response in India assumes significance. Indian courts have devised their own term, “intimate contact”, as the connecting factor in lieu of “habitual residence” to address legal battles in intercountry child abduction cases. This article explores the Indian stance on intercountry child abduction. The article provides a critical analysis of the application of the principle of welfare of the child by the Indian judiciary in child abduction cases. Jurisprudence reveals that Indian courts have assessed the contours of the best interest of the child not just from the point of the habitual residence of the child, but considering the overall interest of the child. However, in the absence of a legislative framework, uncertainty prevails. The paper argues that there is a need for comprehensive legislation to address issues and challenges of intercountry child abduction cases, taking into account factors like “domestic violence”, child psychology, and other social factors pertinent for the determination of the best interest of the child.

This article is dedicated to the legal analysis of the specifics of Council Regulation (EU) 2019/1111 in the context of its application to the protection of unaccompanied asylum seeker children. The article emphasizes that European Union law stipulates that unaccompanied children migrating from third countries to the EU must be protected, regardless of whether they fall under the general European asylum system. The European Regulation (EU) 2019/1111 plays a significant role in this context, as it guarantees the protection of unaccompanied children migrating to the EU by establishing parental responsibility. Although maintaining family unity aligns with the best interests of the child, the right to family reunification is not always straightforward or feasible for unaccompanied migrant children, who often lack documentation. Moreover, the exercise of the right to reunification does not always align with the principle of the best interests of these children. Therefore, it is crucial to promptly appoint a guardian for such children upon their arrival to advocate for their interests and ensure their protection. To expedite the appointment process and facilitate the effective implementation of other protective measures, Regulation 2019/1111 provides for the possibility of adopting provisional and protective measures. Consequently, the courts of any Member State have the right to adopt provisional and protective national measures if such measures are provided for in the national legislation of that Member State. To date, the case law of the CJEU has established three cumulative requirements for provisional and protective measures: the measure must be temporary, urgent, and must be taken in relation to a child present in the Member State handling the case. Jurisdiction should be determined by the Member State of the child’s habitual residence, except in certain situations, such as when the child’s residence changes or according to an agreement between those with parental responsibility. If no proceedings regarding parental responsibility have been concluded and the child’s habitual residence changes following lawful relocation, jurisdiction should be retained with the child to maintain proximity.

The number of international child abduction in the territory of Pakistan has increased in the wake of a growing trend of cross-cultural marriages. However legal aspects of International child abduction has not received much attention and awareness from the government of Pakistan and relevant authorities. The international community through Hague Convention mechanism lays down procedure to bring back the abducted child to his/her place of habitual residence and attempt to prevent parental child abduction. Hague convention is a multilateral treaty, which addresses parental abduction by facilitating co-operation between central authorities of the signatory countries to expedite the return of the child to the country of their habitual residence. Pakistan is not a party to Hague Convention but cross border families disputes particularly child abduction has been treated with immense importance by the judiciary of Pakistan on the basis of the welfare of child as a guiding principle of family law in custody matters.

In March 2018, the European Commission issued its proposal for a regulation on the law applicable to third-party effects of assignments of claims, aiming to put an end to the ongoing debate on this issue and the legal uncertainty associated with it. On the basis of the Commission’s decision in favour of the application of the law of the assignor’s habitual residence, this article discusses the consequences of the Proposal under European Union (EU) insolvency law. For that purpose, the coherence of the Proposal with the Insolvency Regulation will be examined, first in general and then in more detail. The analysis comes to the result that the Commission’s objective of aligning the Proposal with the legal framework of the Insolvency Regulation has predominantly been well achieved. The authors point out remaining minor inaccuracies that may be clarified in the further legislative process or by later case law. It is concluded that, from the perspective of international insolvency law, the proposed uniform conflict-of-laws rule at the EU level offers a good opportunity to promote legal certainty with regard to cross-border assignments of claims in the future.

This article examines the application of the Rome I Regulation to contracts for the cross-border sale of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), a novel category of digital assets. While NFT transfers are increasingly common in digital commerce, the legal framework for determining applicable law in such transactions remains unsettled. The research adopts a doctrinal legal analytical research method grounded in the systematic interpretation of European Union (EU) legislation, case law, academic commentary and comparative soft law instruments. It focuses on how Articles 3 and 4 of Rome I operate in decentralised, pseudonymous environments where conventional connecting factors such as habitual residence and contract typologies are difficult to apply. The findings demonstrate that although Rome I remains formally applicable, its conceptual foundations—especially the reliance on territorial connecting factors and analogue contract classifications—are tested by emerging realities in NFT sales. The article concludes by identifying areas where interpretative guidance or targeted legislative reform may be necessary to ensure legal certainty and coherence in NFTrelated transactions. Keywords: applicable law; NFT sales; Rome I.

Studies of lawyers and clients tend to be lawyer centric. How clients see lawyers—their own or those of other parties—is less emphasised. In this article we report the perspective of ten women who had been subject to a Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction process. The Convention was created to address removal of children from custodial mothers by non-custodial fathers and aims to ensure the safe return of children to their country of “habitual residence”. However, the Hague Convention process, and the lawyers and courts that administer it, do not adequately respond to situations where mothers are fleeing domestic and family violence with their children. The women we spoke with had all fled domestic and family violence and sought safety by returning to their own country. They had been subject to a Hague Convention process for the return of their child(ren) to the country and custody of their perpetrator and experienced an accusatory, uncaring, hostile legal profession. The women felt that the lawyers were motivated by moral assessments of them and their behaviour. The lawyers were seen as participating and continuing the violence as an agent of the perpetrator and the state.

While interim measures have been available to parties in international arbitration for decades, recent years have witnessed an explosion in the number of requests submitted and decided. In the context of investment-treaty arbitration, this boom in interim measures decisions has brought a great diversity of substance, making a comprehensive look at the current state of interim measures both timely and necessary. This article is divided into four remaining sections, designed to appeal to practitioners, parties, and decision-makers alike. The second and third sections look to assist in the proper drafting of an interim measures request and order, by identifying and discussing current developments in the key institutional rules and legal standards. We start by addressing developments in the legal standards underpinning interim measures, which arise from institutional rules and case-law developments and involve some or all of the following factors: (1) urgency in the sense that the risk of harm or prejudice is imminent; (2) a threat of substantial or irreparable harm to rights or property capable of being protected by the tribunal; (3) prima facie jurisdiction over the subject-matter of the request; (4) prima facie establishment of a valid claim on the merits; and (5) the extent to which interim measures would burden the other party. Although the decision whether to grant interim measures is necessarily fact-specific, making a clear synthesis of the case law not always possible, a few threads have emerged in the recent case law, particularly regarding irreparable harm and urgency. Recent developments with respect to these two elements – which arguably contain the most ascertainable legal standards among the five – warrant practitioners’ attention, including the importance of changed circumstances for urgency, and the impact of the form of relief requested ( i.e. , non-monetary or monetary damages) on proving irreparable harm. The third section therefore …

This chapter demonstrates the balance that has been struck between the free movement rights, those of economically inactive persons included, and the Member States' interest in limiting access to their solidarity systems. The author comments on the recent developments in the ECJ's case law towards a broad interpretation of the notion of 'worker', as a result of which some categories of inactive persons are considered to be workers as well, and on the effect this has with regard to access to social benefits for these 'workers' and the members of their family. The chapter focuses on the consequences of this financial responsibility in relation to the application of Directive 2004/38 on the right of residence. The author comments on the effect the ECJ's recent case law, based on the notion of European citizenship, has on economically inactive EU citizens' entitlement to social minimum benefits when they move within the EU. Keywords: ECJ; EU citizens; free movement; Member States

Building Blocks of Society: History, Information Ecosystems, and Infrastructures

This article provides a critical review of aero-optics with an emphasis on recent developments in computational predictions and the physical mechanisms of flow-induced optical distortions. Following a brief introduction of the fundamental theory and key concepts, computational techniques for aberrating flow fields and optical propagation are discussed along with a brief survey of wave-front sensors used in experimental measurements. New physical understanding generated through numerical and experimental investigations is highlighted for a number of important aero-optical flows, including turbulent boundary layers, separated shear layers, and flow over optical turrets. Approaches for mitigating aero-optical effects are briefly discussed.

<p>Hydrodynamic models (numerical solutions of the Saint Venant equations) are at the core of simulating water movements in natural streams and drainage systems. They enable realistic simulations of water movement and are directly linked to physical system characteristics such as channel slope and diameter. This feature is important for man-made drainage structures as it enables straightforward testing of the effects of varying channel designs. In cities, models with hundreds up to tens of thousands of pipes are commonly used for drainage infrastructure. Their computational expense remains high and they are not suited for a systematic screening of design options, discussing water management options in workshops, as well as many real-time applications such as data assimilation.</p><p>Hydrologists have developed many approaches to enable faster simulations. All of these do, however, compromise on the physical detail of the simulated processes (for example, by simulating only flows using linear reservoirs), and usually also on the spatial and temporal resolution of the models (for example, by simulating only flows between key points in the system). The link to physical system characteristics is thus lost. Therefore, it is challenging to incorporate such approaches into planning workflows where changing city plans require a constant revision of water management options.</p><p>Recent advances in scientific machine learning enable the creation of fast machine learning surrogates for complex systems that preserve a high spatio-temporal detail and a physically accurate simulation. We present such an approach that employs generalized residue networks for the simulation of hydraulics in drainage systems. The key concept is to train neural networks that learn how hydraulic states (level, flow and surcharge volume) at all nodes and pipes in the drainage network evolve from one time step to another, given a set of boundary conditions (surface runoff). Training is performed against the output of a hydrodynamic model for a short time series.</p><p>Once trained, the surrogates generate the same results as a hydrodynamic model in the same level of detail, and they can be used to quickly simulate the effect of many different rain events and climate scenarios. Considering pipe networks with 50 to 100 pipes, our approach achieves NSE values in the order of 0.95 for the testing dataset. Simulations are performed 10 to 50 times faster than the hydrodynamic model. Training times are in the order of 25 minutes on a single CPU. The surrogates are system specific and need to be retrained when the physical system changes. To minimize this overhead, we train surrogates for small subsystems which can subsequently be linked into a model for a large drainage network.</p><p>Our approach is an initial application of scientific machine learning for the simulation of hydraulics that is readily combined with other recent developments. Future research should, in particular, explore the application of physics-informed loss functions for bypassing the generation of training data from hydrodynamic simulations, and of graph neural networks to exploit spatial correlation structures in the pipe network.</p>

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as a Model of 'Extended' Corporate Governance: An Explanation Based on the Economic Theories of Social Contract, Reputation and Reciprocal Conformism

This scientific article explores the significance of pragmatic analysis in the field of linguistics. Pragmatics, as a subfield, plays a crucial role in understanding language beyond its structural components, focusing on context, intention, and communicative effectiveness. This article delves into the theoretical foundations of pragmatic analysis, its key concepts, and its applications in linguistic research. Through an extensive literature review, we examine seminal works and recent developments in pragmatic analysis. The main body of the article presents case studies and examples that illustrate the practical implementation of pragmatic analysis in various linguistic contexts. The discussion section critically evaluates the strengths and limitations of pragmatic analysis, considering its interdisciplinary nature and potential areas for future research. The conclusion summarizes the key findings and emphasizes the ongoing relevance and importance of pragmatic analysis in advancing our understanding of language and communication.

This review aims to provide a translational perspective on recent developments in heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF), linking mechanistic insights to potential therapies. A key concept in this review is that HFpEF is a haemodynamic condition wherein the heart fails to keep up with the circulatory demands of the body, or does so at the expense of raised left ventricular filling pressures. We, therefore, propose that the 'final common pathway' for development of congestion, i.e. basic haemodynamic mechanisms of increased left ventricular end-diastolic pressure, left atrial hypertension, pulmonary venous congestion, and plasma volume expansion, represents important initial targets for therapy in HFpEF. Accordingly, we group this review into six mechanisms translating into potential therapies for HFpEF: beginning with three haemodynamic mechanisms (left atrial hypertension, pulmonary hypertension, and plasma volume expansion), and working backward to three potential molecular mechanisms [systemic microvascular inflammation, cardiometabolic functional abnormalities, and cellular (titin)/extracellular (fibrosis) structural abnormalities].