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Abstract: 

This article examines the recent Supreme Court ruling in Monasky v Taglieri, 140 S. Ct. 719 (2020), in which the court has expressed a remarkable indifference to victims of family violence who flee their abuser to go to another country. Monasky was a Hague Convention on International Child Abduction (Convention) case, in which the Supreme Court affirmed a decision to strip an 18-month old from her loving mother, and to send her to another country to live with the abusive father she had never known. In doing so, the Court dispensed with ordinary legal procedures in favor of an immediate conclusion to a disastrous case. It managed this only by studiously ignoring both the profound harms inflicted on the child and her mother by application of the Convention in this case, and Italy’s utter refusal to fulfill the Convention’s purpose—to determine which country should hold a custody hearing—by consistently denying Monasky and her daughter any such hearing.

Keywords: Monasky v. Taglieri; Hague Convention

Affiliations:  1: George Washington University Law School.