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Child-Support Judgments Beyond U.S. Borders

By Seth Lapidow, Michael Rowe and Heidi Tallentire
June 01, 2016

It is supposed to be easy for a litigant who has obtained a child-support judgment from outside of a state to get relief in another state. The whole purpose behind the Uniform Interstate Family Support Act (UIFSA), adopted, for example, as Article 5-b of the New York Family Court Act (FCA), is to make the process uniform, cheap and easy to register and enforce support judgments from different states. But what about a cross-border award? Here, the U.S. government steps in with the Hague Convention on the International Recovery of Child Support and Other Forms of Family Maintenance, a multilateral treaty governing the enforcement of judicial decisions regarding child support (and other forms of family support) extraterritorially. Pursuant to the Convention, the United States has entered into reciprocity agreements with 26 countries which allow the same procedures used to register interstate awards to apply to foreign awards. See http://1.usa.gov/21wU7IY.

What do you do if your child support judgment is from a country not on the list?

The 2015 case of Bond v. Lichtenstein, 129 A.D.3d 535 (1st Dept. 2015), in which the authors represented the mother, Annabelle Bond, is instructive. In that case, Bond brought an action in the Supreme Court, New York County, to enforce the judgment she obtained in Hong Kong awarding child support. The case clarified for the first time how to enforce such an award and the entitlement to attorney fees in so doing.

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