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 of a state to get relief in another state. The whole purpose behind the Uniform Interstate Family Support Act (UIFSA), adopted, for example, 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 the Convention, 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. See http://1.usa.gov/21wU7IY.