In the most difficult cases in family matters, sometimes a party wins the case in Court but is unable to enforce the decision because the other party conceals the reality of his situation.
Often, this type of case is thought to involve unpaid alimony and the impossibility to apprehend the money because the debtor has organized himself to be insolvent. But it also happens, more critically, that a parent obtains in Court the habitual residence of a child and is unable to obtain the execution of the decision because it is impossible for him to locate the child himself.
This was the case of a Hungarian woman who, after her husband abducted their two-year-old son in 2004, was unable to see her son again until 2014, even though she had obtained a divorce and the custody of her son in this period and for many years. It was only after the arrest of the father in 2014 that she was able to find her son, but in the meantime, the decision could not have been executed, despite multiple initiated procedures, the location of the father remaining unknown.
The mother sued the Hungarian State before the European Court of Human Rights, considering that her right to respect for family life had been violated to the extent that the Hungarian authorities had not sufficiently helped her to implement the decisions obtained against her ex-husband and thus to find her son.
The European Court of Human Rights, by decision of January 30, 2018, Edina T. v. Hungary, did consider that in doing so, Hungary had violated Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights and sentenced the State to damages.