Spanish court forces unwilling father to take on shared custody of teenage children

A court in Spain has ordered the father of two teenagers to accept shared custody against his wishes, in what is being hailed as a first in the country.

The Andalucia court ruled that both parents would take weekly shifts looking after the 15-year old boy with a disability and his 17-year old sibling. It comes after the mother said changes in her personal circumstances meant she could no longer cope alone.

According to the ruling by the judge in Córdoba, the change in the childcare regime “provides an opportunity to develop the best conciliation strategies and abilities of both parties for the benefit of the minors”.

María Dolores Azaustre, vice-president of AEAFA, the Spanish family lawyers’ association, called it a “pioneering sentence”. She said: “It’s the first time a father has been forced to engage in shared custody despite his opposition.”

Shared custody has become increasingly favoured in separation cases in Spain, but until now no court had taken the step of enforcing such a schedule on a father who had not expressed a wish for it. “The custom is that shared custody is asked for as a right instead of being considered a responsibility,” said Ms Azaustre.

The mother of the two teenagers was given complete custody of the children according to a 2013 divorce settlement. At a later date, the arrangements were changed with the agreement of both parents to include alternate weekend visits to the father’s house. But this system broke down due to tensions between the younger child and the father.

When the father refused to resume the regime of weekend visits, the mother asked the court to revise the children’s custody due to her state of exhaustion, exacerbated by the death of her father and the subsequent loss of a family support network. She had had to take leave from her nursing job due to an anxiety-related condition.

It follows another ruling in recent weeks by the courts, in which a Madrid father was obliged to accept custody of his eight-year-old autistic son on alternate weekends despite never having looked after the boy in the three years since the couple separated.