January 2024 – Distribution of custody between the two parents with alternating residence

Reformative decision on provisional measures by the court of appeal – reform of a previous judgement that granted custody of a minor exclusively to the mother – temporal distribution of custody between the two parents with alternating residence.

By decision No. 181/2023 of the Single-Member Court of Appeals of the Aegean, the demand of our appointee – the father of a seven-year-old boy – was accepted. The application sought the reform of a prior judgement on provisional measures, specifically decision No. 33/2020 of the Single-Member Court of First Instance of Naxos, which regulated matters of custody and communication of the minor child with the parents, due to a change in circumstances. Precisely, the court, in its aforementioned decision, temporarily allocated the custody of the minor child during weekdays as follows: A) on Mondays and Tuesdays residence with one (1) parent, on Wednesdays and Thursdays residence with the other parent (2), and on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays residence with the first parent, alternating the following week and vice versa.

The same decision rejected as inadmissible the co-filed application of the opposing mother against our appointee. Per her demand, she sought to suspend the execution of the final decision No. 82/2023 from the Single-Member Court of First Instance of Naxos (which had also accepted our appointee’s lawsuit for shared custody with the mother, with alternating residence, and rejected the opposing mother’s counterclaim for exclusive custody) until a decision is issued by the court on her appeal against the final decision.

Although the final decision No. 82/2023 of the Single-Member Court of First Instance of Naxos, which allocated custody of the child between the parents, was issued favorably for our appointee, it could not be executed due to its legal nature. Instead, the prior decision on insurance measures, No. 33/2020, which temporarily assigned custody to the mother and regulated our appointee’s communication with the child, remained executable and applicable.

In the context of the pending appeal initiated by the “defeated” mother before the Court of Appeals of the Aegean, our appointee, citing a change in circumstances, requested the reform of the current decision on insurance measures, which was granted as described above. The court accepted our appointee’s demand and reformed the prior judgement on provisional measures of the Single-Member Court of First Instance of Naxos, attributing this to the alienating behavior that the mother exhibited towards our appointee. The court suggested that the opposing mother systematically hindered and subsequently completely interrupted the communication between the minor child and our appointee, negatively influencing the child against his father.

According to the same decision, there is an immediate and imminent risk of harm to the legal rights of the applicant as a father, rights derived from his right to personal identity. Simultaneously, there is an immediate and imminent risk of harm to the communication rights of the minor child with him, stemming from the mother’s exclusive responsibility for the child’s absence from his life. To best serve the interest of the minor child, identified by the court as the “development of relationships with both parents so that he can evolve into a complete personality in the future”, the temporal distribution of custody between the two parents with alternating residence was ordered. Due to the mother’s stance, she was threatened with a fine of 1000 euros and a personal detention of 6 months for each violation of the court’s order regarding her obligation to deliver the child to the father during the specified times.