Child support: no more escape for ex-partners living outside the EU

Recovering child maintenance from an ex-partner living abroad will become easier, after MEPs yesterday approved final amendments to the Hague Convention on the International Recovery of Child support, which allows it to enter into force in the EU.

This international convention was negotiated by the EU and a number of other countries, including the US, to make it easier to recover maintenance from someone living in another country.

In the EU 13% of couples include someone from a country outside the EU. Thousands of European citizens that do not have the right to child maintenance can now ask for that. This new law creates a central European authority, which will gather all the claims from all the citizens around the European Union and ask governments of third countries about those particular claims.

Denmark and the United Kingdom have not yet joined the Convention.

Antonio López-Istúriz White, the Spanish MEP of the EPP group who was in charge of steering the latest amendments through Parliament, said that someone married in Spain with a partner from the United Kingdom, Denmark or Sweden, should have the same rights in Spain, in Denmark, or in the United Kingdom.

"We are working to enhance cooperation between member states, as they have different laws and different approaches to divorces. For example, we now have the question of the homosexual marriage, which is handled differently in the countries of the European Union and we have to work to have a common stand in the future."