Where a child is too young to acclimate to his surroundings, whether a subjective agreement between the infant's parents is necessary to establish his habitual residence under the Hague Convention

QUESTIONS PRESENTED The Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction requires that any child wrongfully removed from his country of “habitual residence” be returned to that country. C.M. was three years old when he embarked with his parents on a cruise around the world with the . first stop scheduled for Mexico. The plan failed to materialize due to a number of unforeseeable factors, and the child returned with his mother to their home in the United States. The child’s father filed a petition under the Hague Convention seeking C.M.’s return to Mexico. The district court presumptively established Mexico as C.M.’s habitual residence, although the family never had any settled intent to move there and only lived there for 13 months with no established ties to Mexico. The Court of Appeal of the State of California, Second Appellate District, Division Three affirmed after reviewing the district court’s statement of decision and held that a “subjective agreement” between the parents to raise C.M. in Mexico was not necessary to establish that C.M. was a habitual resident of Mexico. The questions presented are: 1. Where a child is too young to acclimate to his surroundings, whether a subjective agreement between the infant’s parents is necessary to establish his habitual residence under the Hague Convention. 2. Was a child’s removal from his mother’s care in the United States, where he was born and had lived his entire life, wrongful, after spending 13 months in Mexico with no intention to move there? 3. To what extent should the legal standard and controlling precedent be extended to determine Habitual Residence in Hague Abduction cases?