Co-parenting across borders: what applies when one parent moves abroad

When one parent moves abroad, co-parenting across borders becomes a legal question before it becomes a practical one. Where both parents hold parental authority (ouderlijk gezag), a child may only be relocated to another country with the written consent of the other parent or with replacement consent from the Dutch court under art. 1:253a BW. Moving without either is wrongful removal, and it can trigger a return procedure under the 1980 Hague Child Abduction Convention as well as criminal liability for removing a minor from lawful authority under art. 279 Sr.

What follows sets out how permission is obtained, how a Dutch court weighs a relocation request, what an international parenting plan has to cover, what happens if a child is taken without consent, and how maintenance and court orders are enforced across borders.

Key points

• Relocating a child abroad requires the written consent of the other parent holding authority, or replacement consent from the court under art. 1:253a BW.
• The court decides on the best interests of the child, weighing the necessity of the move, how well it has been prepared, the alternatives offered and the contact arrangements proposed for the parent staying behind.
• A child of twelve or older is invited to be heard by the court, and a younger child may be heard as well; the child has a voice, not a veto.
• A domestic parenting plan does not survive a move abroad. Travel, costs, communication, decision-making, jurisdiction and applicable law all have to be re-agreed.
• Taking a child abroad without consent or a court order is wrongful removal and can lead to a return order within six weeks per instance, plus criminal proceedings.

When you need permission to move abroad with your child

Everything starts with parental authority. Where both parents hold authority, they exercise it jointly, and neither may take a decision of this magnitude alone. Relocation abroad changes the residence of the child, the school, the language, the healthcare system and above all the practical possibility of contact with the other parent. It is the textbook example of a decision that requires agreement. Our glossary entry on parental authority sets out what the concept covers.

Who holds authority is not always obvious in international families, and it is the first thing to establish. Parents who were married when the child was born hold it jointly, and a divorce does not change that: joint authority continues after the marriage ends unless the court decides otherwise. For unmarried parents the position changed on 1 January 2023. Since that date, a partner who acknowledges a child acquires joint parental authority by operation of law at the moment of acknowledgement. Acknowledgements made before 1 January 2023 fall under the old rule, under which acknowledgement alone gave no authority and joint authority had to be entered in the authority register at the court. If you are in that group, check the register before you assume anything; our article on the acknowledgement of a child in the Netherlands explains the distinction.

Where the other parent has no authority, the relocating parent does not need consent to move, but the other parent retains a right of contact, and a move that frustrates it can be challenged. Where you hold authority alone but the child has a real relationship with the other parent, informing them and proposing a workable contact arrangement is not just courteous; it heads off the application that would otherwise follow.

Consent, and what it should look like

Consent is not a text message saying it is fine. It should be in writing, dated, signed by both parents, and specific enough to be enforced: the destination, the intended date, the address, and the contact and travel arrangements that go with it. In practice the sensible course is to record the consent inside a revised parenting plan, so that permission and the arrangements that make it work are contained in a single document. Consent given for a temporary stay does not become consent for a permanent move, and a parent who agreed to a one-year secondment can withdraw cooperation when the year ends.

Replacement consent from the court

If the other parent refuses, the relocating parent applies to the court for replacement consent under art. 1:253a BW, the provision that governs disputes between parents who exercise authority jointly. The application is heard by the family court, and the court can also decide, in the same set of proceedings, on the division of care and on the contact arrangements that will apply after the move. Where a move is imminent and contested, the other parent can ask the court for provisional measures, and in urgent cases for an injunction prohibiting departure or ordering the surrender of the passport.

One practical warning. Do not move first and apply afterwards. A parent who has already relocated arrives in court having created the situation the judge is asked to assess, and the court is unlikely to reward it. Our guide to Dutch child custody arrangements covers the underlying framework.

How a Dutch court decides a relocation request

The court decides on the basis of the best interests of the child, but that phrase is not a free-floating standard. The Hoge Raad has held that a court must weigh all the circumstances of the case, and Dutch relocation practice has settled around a recognisable set of factors. Knowing them tells you what your application, or your defence, has to address.

• The right of the parent to move and to organise their own life, which is a genuine interest and not a concession, weighed against the interests of the child and the other parent.
• The necessity of the move and the reason behind it: a job, a new partner, family support, or a return to a country of origin. The stronger and more concrete the reason, the better.
• The degree of preparation: housing, school, healthcare, income, language, residence status. A parent who arrives with a researched, costed plan is in a different position from one who has an idea.
• The alternatives offered to compensate for the loss of daily contact, and whether the moving parent has thought about them seriously.
• The extent to which the parents can communicate and cooperate, because an arrangement across borders only works if both of them make it work.
• The age of the child, their roots, and how well they are settled in school and social life where they now live.
• The practical obstacles to contact: distance, cost, flight times, time zones, and who will travel with a young child.
• The financial consequences of the move for both households, including who bears travel costs.
• The division of care before the move: a parent who has cared for the child half the time has more to lose than one who saw the child every other weekend.

No single factor is decisive. A well-founded reason with poor preparation loses; thorough preparation with no real reason to leave often loses too. The strongest applications combine a genuine necessity, a detailed plan and a generous, concrete contact proposal that goes beyond what the parent staying behind currently has.

The voice of the child

A child of twelve or older is invited by the court to give their view, and children under twelve are heard where the court considers it appropriate. The conversation takes place with the judge, without the parents present, and what the child says is weighed alongside everything else. Age and maturity increase the weight given to it, but the child does not decide. Parents who coach a child before that conversation almost always damage their own case, because judges are practised at recognising it.

Timing and what happens in the meantime

Relocation applications take months rather than weeks, and a contested case may involve a report from the Raad voor de Kinderbescherming, the child protection board, which takes longer still. Plan for that. Where the child needs to start school in the destination country in September, the application should be filed early in the year, not in July. Where you fear a unilateral departure while proceedings are pending, ask for provisional measures at the same time as the main application rather than afterwards. If the family has an international dimension, the question of which court may hear the case at all comes first; our article on which Dutch court has jurisdiction in international families deals with that point.

What an international parenting plan must cover

A parenting plan is compulsory in Dutch divorce proceedings and is required in the same way when parents with joint authority who were not married separate. The plan that served a family living twenty minutes apart will not survive a move abroad. Everything that was previously handled by a phone call now has to be written down, because a disagreement that used to be resolved at the front door will otherwise be resolved by a court in a different country.

The plan should deal with each of the following, in terms specific enough to be enforced rather than merely aspirational.

• Residence and the schedule. Where the child lives, and exactly when they are with the other parent. Use defined blocks tied to school holidays in the country where the child attends school, not vague references to the summer.
• Travel and who pays. Who books, by when, which airports, who accompanies a young child, from what age the child may fly unaccompanied, and how the cost is divided. Fix a booking deadline and a deadline for sharing the itinerary.
• Contact between visits. Frequency, duration, platform and fixed times expressed in one named time zone, with an obligation on the resident parent to provide a private space and a working connection.
• Decision-making. Which decisions require joint consent, which may be taken alone, and what happens in a medical emergency. Set a response deadline so that silence does not become a veto.
• School and information. Both parents entitled to receive reports and to be registered with the school; who attends parent evenings and how the other participates remotely.
• Documents. Who holds the passport and identity documents, how renewals are handled, and an undertaking to give the consent each renewal requires.
• Maintenance. Amount, currency, exchange-rate risk, payment date and account, and how indexation is applied.
• Review and dispute resolution. A fixed moment to review the plan, a first step of mediation, and an express agreement on which court has jurisdiction and which law applies.

That last item is routinely forgotten and is the one that costs the most later. Within the European Union, jurisdiction over parental responsibility follows the habitual residence of the child, which means jurisdiction moves with the child once the move has taken place. Agreeing in advance where disputes will be heard, and having the Dutch order in place before departure, keeps control of the process. Our guide to the parenting plan in the Netherlands covers the domestic requirements, and our overview of cross-border legal issues the international ones.

Have the plan confirmed by the court

An agreement between parents is binding between them, but an agreement recorded in a court order is enforceable. Ask the court to incorporate the revised plan in its decision. Within the European Union, a decision on parental responsibility given in one member state is recognised in the others without a separate procedure, and a decision on contact can be enforced abroad. That difference matters on the day a visit is refused. It also matters for maintenance, where an order is far easier to collect than a private agreement.

Passports, travel documents and holiday travel

A Dutch passport or identity card for a minor is issued only with the consent of everyone holding parental authority. If one parent refuses, the other can ask the court to grant replacement consent, and the court will do so where the refusal is not in the interest of the child. Build the mechanism into the parenting plan: an obligation to sign renewal applications within a stated period, and a rule on who holds the document between trips.

Travelling abroad with a child without the other parent is a separate matter. Border authorities may ask a parent travelling alone with a minor to show that the other parent agrees, and the Koninklijke Marechaussee publishes a consent form for exactly this purpose, to be carried together with a copy of the identity document of the consenting parent and, where surnames differ, an extract from the register of births. It is not a legal requirement in every case, but a refused boarding at the gate is not the moment to argue about that. Our article on holidays with children after divorce deals with the everyday version of this question.

Foreign forms have no place here. Consent requirements for a Dutch child travelling from the Netherlands are governed by Dutch rules and by the entry rules of the destination country; procedures from other jurisdictions, however convenient they look online, do not satisfy them. Check the entry requirements of the destination and of any country of transit, well before departure.

When a move becomes child abduction

Taking a child abroad, or keeping a child abroad after an agreed visit, without the consent of the other parent holding authority or a court order, is wrongful removal or wrongful retention. It is not a technicality. It triggers a return procedure under the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, and within the European Union that Convention is reinforced by the Brussels IIb Regulation. Removing a minor from lawful authority is also a criminal offence under art. 279 Sr.

How a return procedure works

The Convention does not decide custody. Its single purpose is to return the child promptly to the country of habitual residence, so that the courts there can decide where the child should live. It applies where both countries are parties, where the child is under sixteen, and where the removal breached rights of custody actually being exercised under the law of the country the child was taken from.

In the Netherlands, applications run through the Central Authority at the Ministry of Justice and Security, and the cases themselves are concentrated at the court in The Hague, with appeal to the court of appeal in The Hague. The procedure is designed to be fast: the Convention expects a decision within six weeks, and the European rules set a comparable limit for each instance. Before the hearing, parents are offered cross-border mediation over a short, intensive period, which resolves a meaningful share of cases without a contested return order. The Centrum Internationale Kinderontvoering provides information and support to parents on both sides.

When a return can be refused

A court may refuse to order a return in a small number of defined situations: where more than a year has passed and the child is settled in the new environment; where the left-behind parent consented or acquiesced in the move; where there is a grave risk that return would expose the child to physical or psychological harm or otherwise place them in an intolerable situation; and where a child who has reached an age and maturity at which their views should be taken into account objects to being returned. These exceptions are applied narrowly. Within the European Union, a refusal is not necessarily the end of the matter, because the courts of the country of habitual residence retain the power to take a decision on custody that can override it.

Countries outside the Convention

Where the destination is not a party to the Convention, there is no return mechanism, and the left-behind parent depends on the law and the courts of that country, on diplomatic channels and on negotiation. Outcomes are slow and uncertain. If a move to such a country is proposed, that fact alone weighs heavily in a relocation application, and any consent should be conditional on safeguards agreed in advance, such as an order recognised in the destination country before departure. Our article on international child abduction sets out the procedure in more detail.

If you fear an abduction

Act before rather than after. Ask the court for an order prohibiting departure and for surrender of the passport, and where the risk is real, for the child to be entered on the list of persons for whom travel documents may not be issued. Keep copies of identity documents and recent photographs, know the address and family details in the other country, and report any concrete threat immediately. Once a child has left, speed determines the outcome: the one-year mark and the question of whether the child has settled both work against the parent who waited.

Maintenance, enforcement and money across borders

A move abroad does not end a maintenance obligation, and it does not end the right to collect one. Within the European Union, maintenance decisions circulate under the European maintenance regulation, which allows an order made in one member state to be enforced in another without a separate recognition procedure in most cases. Outside the Union, the 2007 Hague Convention on the international recovery of child support performs a comparable function for the countries that have joined it, and bilateral arrangements cover part of the remainder.

In the Netherlands, collection can be handed to the Landelijk Bureau Inning Onderhoudsbijdragen, the national maintenance collection agency, which takes over enforcement free of charge for the recipient where payments are in arrears and can pursue a debtor abroad through its counterparts. That is usually faster and cheaper than instructing a lawyer in the other country.

Three points belong in the plan rather than in a later dispute. State the currency and who bears the exchange-rate risk, because paying the same number in a different currency is not paying the same amount. State how indexation works: Dutch maintenance amounts are adjusted each year by a percentage set by the Minister of Justice and Security and published in advance, and the plan should say whether that adjustment applies after the move. And separate travel costs from maintenance, so that a dispute about a flight does not become a dispute about child support. Our guide to alimony in the Netherlands explains how the amounts are calculated.

A change of country is also a change of circumstances. Income, tax, cost of living and the expense of contact travel all shift, and either parent can ask the court to recalculate maintenance on that basis. Anticipating it in the plan, with a review clause, is cheaper than litigating it.

Making the arrangement work in practice

The legal framework creates the possibility of a relationship across a border. It does not create the relationship. What does, in the experience of families who manage it well, is predictability: a child who knows when the next call is and when the next visit is copes far better than a child who is told that daddy or mummy will ring soon.

Fix the calls at times that suit the child rather than the adult, and keep them even when there is nothing to report; short and regular beats long and occasional. Let the contact be about ordinary things, homework, a game, a bedtime story, rather than an interrogation about the week. Stay connected to the practical side of the child life by being registered with the school and receiving reports directly, so that you are informed rather than briefed. Keep a shared calendar and a written record of what is agreed, which matters both for cooperation and, if things go wrong, for evidence.

For the parent at home, the obligation runs the other way. Dutch law expects the parent with whom the child lives to promote the bond with the other parent, and a pattern of frustrated contact is one of the strongest grounds for the court to change an arrangement. Speak well of the other parent, protect the call time, and do not use contact as leverage over money. Where contact is genuinely harmful and has to be limited, that is a decision for the court, not for one parent; our article on when child contact arrangements can be restricted explains the test.

Shared tools help, provided they are agreed rather than imposed. A shared calendar with automatic time-zone conversion, a single agreed channel for co-parenting messages kept separate from personal ones, and a shared folder with school reports, medical records and copies of travel documents remove most of the friction. Keep the record neutral and factual; anything written in a co-parenting channel may end up being read by a judge.

Which court decides, and under which law

In an international family the first question is never what the rule is, but whose rule applies. Jurisdiction over parental responsibility, meaning authority, residence and contact, follows the habitual residence of the child. Within the European Union this is governed by the Brussels IIb Regulation; in relation to a number of countries outside the Union the 1996 Hague Child Protection Convention performs the same function. Habitual residence is a factual concept: it is where the child actually has the centre of their life, judged on school, language, social ties and the intentions of the parents, not on where anyone is registered.

Two consequences follow. First, once the child has genuinely settled in the new country, the Dutch court loses jurisdiction over future disputes about residence and contact, and any later change has to be sought there. Second, in the period immediately after a move the position can be genuinely uncertain, which is one reason why an order obtained before departure is worth so much more than an argument afterwards. Where a case is already running in the Netherlands when the move happens, the Dutch court in principle retains jurisdiction over it.

Applicable law does not always follow jurisdiction. A Dutch court hearing a case about a child habitually resident in the Netherlands applies Dutch law to parental responsibility, but maintenance has its own conflict rules and questions of descent and name follow yet another set. That is a specialist exercise, and it is one of the reasons why a plan drafted for one country rarely survives contact with the second one.

When it is the other parent who leaves

Much of the advice about relocation is written for the parent who wants to go. If you are the one staying, your position is stronger than it usually feels, but it depends on acting early and on being constructive rather than merely opposed.

Opposing a relocation outright, with no alternative offered, is rarely the most effective strategy. Courts weigh the willingness of each parent to cooperate, and a parent who has proposed a detailed alternative arrangement, longer holiday blocks, a share of travel costs matched to income, a fixed call schedule and a commitment to attend school events remotely, presents better than one who has only said no. If the move goes ahead in spite of your objection, that same proposal becomes the starting point for the arrangement you will live with.

Where consent is being sought from you, do not give it informally and do not give it in stages. Ask for the whole picture, the destination, the address, the school, the intended date and the contact proposal, and record your agreement in a revised parenting plan confirmed by the court. Consent to a trial period should say in terms what happens when the trial period ends, including where the child lives if you do not agree to continue.

And if a move has already happened without your agreement, treat it as urgent. Contact the Central Authority and take legal advice within days rather than weeks, because both the one-year period under the Convention and the question of whether the child has become settled in the new environment turn on how quickly you act.

When to involve a family lawyer

Some situations are workable between parents and some are not. Take advice at the point where any of the following is true: consent is refused and a departure date is approaching; you fear the child will be taken without your agreement; the destination is outside the Hague Convention; a court order already exists and one parent wants to change it; or the family has assets, maintenance obligations or residence permits in more than one country. In each of these, the cost of acting early is a fraction of the cost of acting late.

There is also a timing point that is easy to miss. Once a child has been living in another country for a period, jurisdiction over parental responsibility follows the child, and decisions that could have been taken by a Dutch court will be taken elsewhere. If a Dutch order is what you need, obtain it before the move rather than after it. A family law specialist can also arrange for a Dutch decision to be recognised in the destination country, so that the plan you have agreed can actually be enforced there. Where the separation itself is still to be arranged, our guide to international divorce in the Netherlands covers jurisdiction, applicable law and recognition.

Frequently asked questions

The legal principles behind co-parenting across borders usually come down to a handful of practical questions. These are the ones we are asked most often.

How Law and More can help

Law and More advises parents in the Netherlands on relocation, parenting plans with an international dimension, contact arrangements, maintenance across borders and international child abduction. We apply for or oppose replacement consent under art. 1:253a BW, draft parenting plans that hold up in more than one jurisdiction, act in return proceedings in The Hague, and arrange for Dutch decisions to be recognised abroad. If a move is being planned or feared, contact our office before anyone books a flight.