KOCHI: The Kerala Supreme Court has denied a request by a US resident Indian father to state that a family court here does not have jurisdiction to file custody of his child, who is a US citizen by birth.
The father had presented the mother with an order from a US Supreme Court to father the child.
A departmental bank made up of Judges K Vinod Chandran and MR Anitha was considering a petition from Rajkumar Sasidharan, who lives in San Francisco. His wife had traveled to India in January 2018 with their son, who was born in February 2017, and filed for divorce in July 2018 and applied for custody of the child in the family court in Thiruvananthapuram.
The husband filed a child abduction complaint in September 2018, on the basis of which the California Supreme Court passed an order in January 2019 calling on the mother to give birth. By filing a habeas corpus application with Kerala HC, the husband asserted that the family court did not have jurisdiction and that the child should be presented for return to the USA.
“We find no reason to deny jurisdiction to the Thiruvananthapuram Family Court just because the child is a US citizen, especially if the citizenship does not preclude the child from normally living with their mother, who is an Indian citizen, at least until they achieve a majority “, It says in the judgment.
The court also ruled that a decision of a foreign court only needs to be examined with reasonable weight and that more weight needs to be attached to the best interests of the child.
The child left the United States when they were only 10 months old and too young to absorb the customs of their citizenship country, the court said.