Supreme Court to hear international child custody case

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear a dispute from the Cleveland area that could set a precedent for contentious international child custody cases.

At issue is custody of the 4-year-old daughter of Michelle Monasky, a research biologist from Ohio, whose child was born in Italy while Monasky was married to Italian physician Domenico Taglieri. Court documents say the couple had a rocky relationship that included domestic violence. In April 2015, before the child was 8 weeks old, Monasky and the baby moved into her parents’ home in Painesville, east of Cleveland. Taglieri said Monasky abducted the baby and sought custody.

After a four-day trial in March 2016, U.S. District Judge Solomon Oliver Jr. decided Italy was the baby’s “habitual residence” under terms of the Hague Convention on child abduction, and he ordered that the child, called “A.M.T” in court papers, return there. Monasky moved back to Italy to be near the child while custody lawsuits continued in both countries, said one of her Cleveland attorneys, Christopher R. Reynolds.

The U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2017 ratified the child’s transfer to Italy, upholding Oliver’s findings and ruling that Monasky didn’t prove any “grave risk” to A.M.T. because of the domestic abuse allegations against Taglieri.

Monasky appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that Oliver’s decision on the baby’s “habitual residence” was incorrect because the child was too young to be acclimated to Italy when she left the country and because Monasky and Taglieri had never established where they intended to raise the child. They said the ruling against Monasky conflicts with other federal court precedents that stipulate “where the acclimatization standard cannot be used, the parents must actually have agreed at some point on where to raise the infant to establish her habitual residence in that country.”

“The court has never addressed the meaning of ‘habitual residence’ and the substantive standard for its determination, or the standard of review to be applied in reviewing such a determination,” Monasky’s appeal said. “This case provides the court with a valuable opportunity to address both of those important questions.”

Taglieri’s attorneys urged the Supreme Court against hearing the case, noting that child custody questions are “highly fact-bound, typically requiring the trier of fact to resolve conflicting evidence. That is precisely what the district court did in this case.” They said the court should reject Monasky’s “attempts to manufacture conflicts in the lower courts justifying this court’s review.”

A Cleveland-based attorney for Taglieri, John D. Sayre, said he believes the court might have taken the case because it wants “to announce some definite standards to eliminate some of the confusion” in adjudicating international custody matters that involve infants. If the court decides that A.M.T’S habitual residence was incorrectly decided, Sayre said Oliver would have to review his decision.

Both sides said they expect to submit briefs to the court and argue the case this fall or next spring.

“This is a hugely important issue, given how small our world is becoming,” said Reynolds, the attorney for Monasky. “We have an increasingly mobile world, where people’s moves or relocations, however temporary or permanent they may be, have consequences.