Divorce

Once a person files a petition for divorce, the other party must be served with notice of the case. There are specific service rules for how petitions are supposed to be served upon someone who is in another country. There is a legal agreement (a “treaty”) called the Hague Convention on Service that was established many years ago to set a process for how to serve documents abroad and how proof of service could be accomplished. Each country designates a “Central Authority” to accept incoming requests for service on forms specified by the Hague Convention . The Central Authority arranges for service in a manner permitted within that country. The Central Authority may require that the document be written in, or translated to, the official language of the state addressed.

Once service is completed, the Central Authority returns a certificate of service to the party in the U.S. or his/her lawyer, which would then be filed in the court. If the document cannot be served, the Central Authority must provide a certificate setting out the reasons preventing service.

However, I recognize that just because a person gets served abroad, it may not be possible for that person to physically appear in court to defend against the court case. Therefore, when someone is served, s/he may immediately want to reach out to an attorney in the county and state where the court case is filed to see if that attorney can file any court papers in response that are needed and appear in court for the person living abroad. If that’s not possible, the person living abroad may want to call the courthouse and find out how to “appear” via phone or video call. Here is a link to attorneys in STATE [HYPERLINK] in case you want to call to try to seek help if you get served with divorce papers.

It’s also possible, however, that the party in the U.S. can lie and say that s/he doesn’t know where the abroad party is living – without telling the judge that the other party is abroad. If the judge is convinced that the party cannot be found to be served with the court papers, it’s possible the judge may allow “service by publication,” which means that a notice of the court case is published in local newspapers. If this happens, then the person abroad would never know about the court case and would end up not appearing in court (defaulting) and this can have serious negative effects on the party abroad. To try to avoid this, if a party abroad knows that a court case is soon to be filed, s/he may want to reach out to an attorney in the state/county where it would be filed to hire the attorney to check the court filings periodically to see if a case is filed. Or calling the courthouse may be another way to find out if a case has been filed – the court may even have an online filing system open to the public where the person abroad can log in and check to see what was filed. And then once a person knows what was filed, s/he can call the court to ask how to “appear” via phone or video call.