Recognizing Child Support Judgments Beyond U.S. Borders

It is supposed to be easy for a litigant who has obtained a child support judgment from outside New York to get relief in New York. The whole purpose behind the Uniform Interstate Family Support Act (UIFSA), adopted as Article 5-b of the New York Family Court Act (FCA), is to make the process uniform, cheap and easy to register and enforce support judgments from different states. But what about a cross-border award? Here the U.S. government steps in with the Hague Convention on the International Recovery of Child Support and Other Forms of Family Maintenance, a multilateral treaty governing the enforcement of judicial decisions regarding child support (and other forms of family support) extraterritorially, pursuant to which the United States has entered into reciprocity agreements with 26 countries which allow the same procedures used to register interstate awards to apply to foreign awards.¹ But what do you do if your child support judgment is from a country not on the list?

The 2015 case of Bond v. Lichtenstein, in which the authors represented the mother, Annabelle Bond, is instructive. In that case, Bond brought an action in the Supreme Court, New York County, to enforce the judgment she obtained in Hong Kong awarding child support. The case clarified for the first time how to enforce such an award and the entitlement to attorney fees in so doing.²

Options in New York