Gujarat high court orders father to return son to mother in Canada | Ahmedabad News
Ahmedabad: The Gujarat high court has ordered a man to hand over custody of his 5-year-old son to his wife, so that the child can be taken back to Canada where she lives. The HC has ordered so by holding the child’s custody with the father “unlawful” because he brought the child from Canada to India without the mother’s permission.While ordering the return of the child’s custody to the mother in Canada as he was born and brought up there, the HC said, “Displacing such a child to a country like India and forcing the child to stay away from the mother would, in our view, be traumatic to the child. The secure atmosphere that the child enjoyed would be transformed into a new and alien atmosphere where he would be forced to adapt to come to terms with people who are fundamentally strangers to him…” The couple in this case got married in 2018 in Toronto. They had a son in 2020. Following marital discord, the man decided to return to India. The child was living with his mother since March 2024. The mother approached the Ontario court of Justice for guardianship rights for her son, and both the parties were engaged in the litigation. In Dec 2025, the father brought the child to India without the permission of the child’s mother. She filed a habeas corpus petition in the Gujarat high court seeking the son’s custody on the grounds that despite the court in Canada declaring her the legal custodian of the child, her husband brought the son to India without her permission. The man defended his case by placing a note, which he had submitted in Canada’s court, in which he had asserted that being Hindus, “it would not be in the best interest of the son to grow up experiencing and observing his mother in an unhealthy relationship and it would be better for the son to be brought up with Hindu cultural values, Indian ethos and traditional Hindu identity”. However, the HC refused to accept his defence and said, “The custody of the child was lawfully with the mother, and since it is not in dispute that the child was removed from Canada without the permission of the mother and brought to India, the father’s custody would have to be declared as unlawful.” The HC ordered the return of the child’s OCI card and passport while handing over his custody to the mother’s parents for taking him to Canada. It said, “It cannot also be in dispute that the standard of living in Canada, to which the child was accustomed, would obviously be better than the standard of living that the father can provide in India. Since the child has been born in Canada and has been virtually brought up there his entire life, it would not be in the interest of the child if this normalcy is disrupted and he is made to face an alien culture and a completely new atmosphere.“
