The International Child Abduction Remedies Act (ICARA); The “age & maturity exception” to the requirement that a court order a wrongfully removed child’s return; The Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction; Whether the child “expressed particularized objections” to his return during his in camera interview with the district court; Whether the child’s preference was due to “the abductor parent’s undue influence”

The court held that the district court properly applied the “age and maturity exception” to the ICARA’s requirement to order the return of a wrongfully removed child where it interviewed the child and concluded that he was “mature enough to have an informed view about his return to Finland and to his father[,]” and that he had “expressed particularized objections” to his return. Defendant-Owusu removed her son B.B. from Finland, violating her ex-husband’s (plaintiff-Boa-Bonsu) custody rights. He filed a petition under the ICARA in federal court in Ohio, where B.B. was located. The parents were married and lived in Finland when B.B. was born. They later divorced and received joint custody in the Finnish courts. B.B. was eight years old at the time of the district court proceedings. In those proceedings, when B.B. was interviewed in camera, he expressed unhappiness about spending time at his father’s house, and a desire not to return to Finland, stating that he did not know how to speak the language anymore and that he wanted to stay with his unborn sibling (his mother was pregnant). The district court ruled that B.B. had been “wrongfully removed” from Finland, which was his habitual residence, and that Boa-Bonsu still retained and had exercised his joint-custody rights. But it found that B.B. should not be returned under the Hague Convention’s age and maturity exception. On appeal, the court noted “there is no age cutoff below which a child may not, as a matter of law, be considered mature.” Thus, the district court was entitled to rely on its own observations during the in camera interview and did not clearly err by concluding that he was “mature enough to have an informed view about” being returned. As to the objection requirement, under the Hague Convention courts have generally required that “a child’s objection consist of more than a mere preference to remain in the country of removal.” The court agreed that more was required and held that the district court did not clearly err “in finding that B.B. expressed particularized objections to his return as opposed to a general preference to remain in the United States.” It also declined to disturb the district court’s finding that Owusu’s influence “did ‘not rise to the level of undue influence that would render B.B.’s objections unreliable.’” It affirmed the district court’s denial of Boa-Bonsu’s petition.