In July 2025, a British family living in Florida travelled to the UK for a three-week holiday. Their elder son, then 14, understood that they would all be going home at the end of it. While they were in Scotland, his mother told his father that she intended to stay, and to keep both boys with her. The father did not agree.
Their case, In the Petition of DM [2026] UKSC 32, was decided by the Supreme Court in September 2026. At its centre was the 14-year-old’s own wish to return to Florida. The court confirmed that his views counted, but made clear that listening to a child and doing as the child asks are two different things.
From holiday to Hague proceedings
Proceedings began when the father applied for the return of both boys to the United States under the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. The Convention is not confined to cases in which a child is taken covertly. Where a child travels abroad with both parents’ agreement and one parent then decides, without the other’s consent, that the child will not go home, that can amount to wrongful retention. The Convention’s answer is to return the child promptly to the country where they normally live, so that the courts there can decide the longer-term arrangements. Those proceedings are deliberately narrow. They do not ask which parent, or which country, offers the better life.
A parent resisting return must establish one of a limited number of exceptions. In this case, the mother argued that returning the boys would expose them to a grave risk of physical or psychological harm, or otherwise place them in an intolerable situation. Her claims rested primarily on the state of her mental health. Given her history, she said there was a real risk she would take her own life if the children were sent back without her, and that this would cause the boys extreme psychological harm.
Two brothers, two different answers
Through his own lawyer, the elder boy told the court that he wanted to go back to Florida. The judge who first heard the case took that into account. He accepted the mother’s argument in relation to the eight-year-old, but not his older brother, and ordered that the 14-year-old alone be returned. For a time, the two brothers faced living on opposite sides of the Atlantic.
The mother appealed, and the Scottish appeal court took a very different view of the boy’s wishes. In its judgment, they should not have been considered at all when assessing the risk of harm. With his views set aside, it established there was indeed an exception and refused to send him back. The father and the boy himself then took the case to the Supreme Court.
What the Supreme Court decided
On the boy’s views, the Supreme Court unanimously disagreed with the appeal court. A child’s views can properly be taken into account when the court decides whether returning them would expose them to grave risk. Children in these cases should generally be given the chance to be heard, unless they are too young or not mature enough for that to be appropriate.
Being heard, however, is not the same as deciding. How much weight a court gives to a child’s views depends on several things, one of which is whether those views are genuinely the child’s own, rather than shaped by one of the parents. In this case, there was conflicting evidence about whether the father had influenced the boys. Unable to decide either way, the first judge set the question aside, and the Supreme Court said he was entitled to do so. Because the doubt was never resolved, the boy’s wishes could not carry the weight the first judge had given them.
A more fundamental problem lay elsewhere. Everything the boy said assumed that his mother would still be alive. He spoke about returning to Florida and about keeping in touch with her, visiting her in Scotland if she stayed. Nobody had asked him how he would cope if she took her own life, and the Supreme Court was clear that it would have been completely inappropriate to do so.
His wishes therefore could not answer the risk on which the mother’s case rested. That is a real limit on the principle that children should be heard. Some questions are too grave to put to a child, and a court can listen carefully without asking the child to carry the weight of every consequence.
The way the court assessed that risk offers guidance of its own wherever a parent’s mental health is in issue. An argument that a parent may take their own life cannot be accepted at face value. It has to be examined with great care, because otherwise the Convention’s purpose of securing a child’s prompt return could be too easily defeated.
Where a real risk is established, however, its seriousness must be weighed alongside its likelihood. A parent’s suicide is likely to cause a child extreme psychological harm, so even a small risk can be enough to count as grave. Nor could the risk be treated as borderline, as the first judge had described it. Either a grave risk is established or it is not. The Supreme Court described this as a classic example of a low risk of really serious harm, concluded that the exception was clearly made out, and confirmed that the elder boy would not be ordered back to Florida.
Implications for parents
For anyone thinking of relocating abroad with children, the starting point is agreement. A holiday that becomes a permanent move without the other parent’s consent can lead to proceedings in which the expected outcome is return. The mother in this case succeeded, but only after the dispute had passed through three levels of court, with both children’s futures uncertain throughout. Where agreement is not possible, the proper route is to seek the court’s permission before the move, not to justify it afterwards.
A parent whose child has not come home should take specialist advice quickly. These cases are designed to move fast, and where more than a year passes before proceedings begin, the court may refuse return if the child has settled into their new life.
For parents of older children, the judgment confirms that a teenager’s views can carry significant weight and cannot be set aside merely because other issues are in play. They do not, however, determine the outcome. Courts will look at what the child says, how old and mature they are, whether the views are truly their own and whether they speak to the risk the court is weighing. Drawing a child into the dispute, or encouraging them towards a particular position, risks weakening the very evidence a parent might hope to rely on.
A child’s views form part of the evidence. Responsibility for the decision remains with the court.
