European divorces focus of new rules

Bitter divorce battles over who gets the kids and the coffee table should reach faster resolution for European couples under new divorce and child abduction rules agreed among member states Friday.

Every year, some 140,000 couples of different EU nationalities seek to split, triggering a wave of potential legal disputes over which law applies, since they could claim to divorce where they live or where they’re from. The new rules speed up some of the legal proceedings and set standard terms for how a divorce can be rejected, the European Commission said in a statement published on its website.

The rules also give a voice to children, if they can talk, to tell a judge what they want. When a child has been taken to another country by one parent, courts set clear deadlines to try and reach a decision quickly.

Courts can order contact between the child and the left-behind parent or set limits on contact if the child is at risk from an abusive parent who is seeking for the child to be returned to a previous home country.

There are some 1,800 cases every year of a parent taking a child to another country away from the other parent.

Despite the EU’s own lengthy and acrimonious divorce from the United Kingdom since the U.K. voted to leave the bloc in 2016, the U.K. signed up to the new divorce rules. Denmark did not.

The rules should enter into law in the coming months, the commission said.