Relocation - the search for common principles

Lord Justice Thorpe considers the "relatively modern phenomenon" of parental disputes over relocation - both within the home country and abroad.

He covered the search for common principles between international jurisdictions, and offered a possible solution.

"In many of our jurisdictions relationships are easily formed and children follow. But the relationships are as easily unformed and the family fractured. In such a painful process one of the parents may well at some level need to distance himself or herself physically as well as emotionally from the other. Dissention results and the contested relocation case is born. Judges in several jurisdictions have said that these are some of the most difficult cases that a trial judge has to decide."