2008 Amendments to the Uniform Interstate Family Support Act ...

Beginning in June 2003, and continuing through November 2007, more than 70 countries
met in The Hague, Netherlands, in five separate negotiating sessions to forge a new Hague
Convention on the Enforcement of Child Support and Other Forms of Family Maintenance.
The United States delegation, headed by the U.S. State Department and including
members from OCSE and other experts, was a crucial participant throughout the term of
negotiations. It was clearly a goal of all the parties engaging in the negotiations that the United
States be an active party and ultimately adopt the Convention.
As a first step, the Convention was signed by the United States at The Hague,
Netherlands, on November 23, 2007. In context, this initial signature represents a commitment
by the executive branch of the federal government to make a good- faith effort to bring the
Convention into force. If the Senate gives its advice and consent to the Convention, it is signed
by the President, and the appropriate documents are filed in The Hague, the federal preemption
of the issue via the treaty clause will be sufficient to make the Convention “the law of the land.”
See U.S. Const. art. VI., cl. 2. However, because this multilateral treaty is not self-executing,
additional federal or state statutory enactments are necessary to enable the treaty and make it
readily accessible to bench and bar. Because establishment, enforcement, and modification of
family support are basically matters of state law, from the perspective of the Uniform Law
Commission the vehicle for the acceptance into force of the new Convention is a revision of
UIFSA 2001, hereafter called UIFSA (2008). In time, it is anticipated the new Hague
Maintenance Convention will achieve a high level of integration with many other countries.
III. Drafting Principles for UIFSA (2008)
The basic principles underlying the drafting of UIFSA (2008) anticipated a strictly
limited revision of the act in order to integrate the appropriate provisions of the new Convention
into state law. Because UIFSA (2001) had such a wide influence on the text of the new
Convention, in very many instances the principles, and sometimes almost the exact text, of the
Convention were already contained in UIFSA (2001). The clear drafting goal was to integrate the
Convention into state law, and not to revise UIFSA (2001) in a substantive manner. Most
frequently the amendment to the existing text was merely to add “or a foreign country” to the
directives about how a “tribunal of this state” should deal with an order or another action of a
“state.” Correspondingly, the definition of “state” no longer contains the legal fiction that a
foreign country is a state of the United States.
Similarly, a significant portion of the language of the Convention need not be included in
state law because that text speaks to the “Contracting States,” that is, to the countries in which
the Convention will come into force. A substantial percentage of the articles in the Convention
are directed to the agreement between nation states or their political subdivisions, which do not
implicate state tribunals. A majority of the provisions, however, do speak, the “competent
authorities,” which means to those tribunals charged with the obligation of applying the
Convention to actual support orders. In sum, with relatively minimal amendments, the text of
UIFSA (2008) combines the principles of UIFSA and the Convention with the required actions
of a state tribunal to put the Convention into effect.
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