The Taipei District Court on Friday ruled that a child at the center of a custody battle between an Italian father and a Taiwanese mother should spend part of her school vacations in Italy with her father.
The court said that to strengthen the child’s “direct and personal relations with her father and [paternal] relatives,” she should spend 10 and 30 days respectively of her winter and summer vacations in Italy.
The legal battle started in 2017, when the father took the girl — who at the time lived with her mother, surnamed Chan (詹), in Taiwan — to Italy to visit his family, where she remained against the will of her mother.
Photo: Wang Meng-lun, Taipei Times
Chan later traveled to Italy and brought her daughter back, which the father described as abduction.
He subsequently traveled to Taiwan to fight for legal custody of the child.
The girl was born in 2014, but the parents were never married.
In January, the court ruled that the father had sole parental rights and ordered Chan to return the child to her father by March 14. Chan lodged an appeal in February, but the Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s decision.
The case garnered media attention after the girl wrote a widely publicized letter to President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), in which she said she wished to stay in Taiwan.
After the girl refused to be taken by judicial officers from her school on March 14, Chan appealed to the Constitutional Court later that month, requesting a stay of execution, which was granted.
After hearing the case, the Constitutional Court in May found that the Supreme Court’s ruling had contravened the Constitution’s intent to protect the personal rights and dignity of minors.
It returned the case to the Supreme Court, which in October invalidated its initial ruling and sent the case back to the Taipei District Court.
In its ruling on Friday, the district court acknowledged the girl had not expressed a desire to spend vacations with her father in her testimony.
However, based on the child’s “contradictory” statements — such as that she missed her father, but did not want to see him — the court concluded that she was “facing a loyalty dilemma” in the conflict between her parents and that her words “did not necessarily reflect her actual feelings.”
The court also admonished the parents, saying their “mutual mistrust” had caused the child to “lose out on the linguistic and cultural advantages of dual citizenship,” and subjected her to emotionally traumatic experiences.
The intent of the verdict is to “rebuild a cooperative coparenting relationship” and restore to the child the benefits of dual citizenship, the court said, adding that it had referred the parents and girl to counseling services to help facilitate the process.
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