Colorado § 14-5-616 - Procedure to register child support order of foreign country for modification.

§ 14-5-616. Procedure to register child support order of foreign country for modification.

A party or support enforcement agency seeking to modify, or to modify and enforce, a foreign child support order not under the Convention may register that order in this state under sections 14-5-601 through 14-5-608 if the order has not been registered. A petition for modification may be filed at the same time as a request for registration, or at another time. The petition must specify the grounds for modification.

Source: L. 2015: Entire part amended, (HB 15-1198), ch. 173, p. 561, § 31, effective July 1.

COMMENT

The procedure for registration and enforcement set forth in Sections 601 through 608 is applicable to a child-support order from a non-Convention country. This section provides coverage for modification in that situation. Presumptively, the general law of the state regarding modification of a child-support order will apply because, by their terms, Sections 609 through 614 apply only to modification of a child-support order by a state tribunal. The rationale is that modification is available because the foreign order is not founded on the UIFSA principles of continuing, exclusive jurisdiction and a controlling order. See Sections 205 through 207.

PART 7

SUPPORT PROCEEDING UNDER CONVENTION

Editor's note: This article was repealed and reenacted in 1993, and this part 7 was subsequently repealed and reenacted in 2015 resulting in the addition, relocation, or elimination of sections as well as subject matter. For amendments to this part 7 prior to 2015, consult the 2014 Colorado Revised Statutes and the Colorado statutory research explanatory note beginning on page vii in the front of this volume.

INTRODUCTORY COMMENT

This article contains provisions adapted from the Convention that could not be readily integrated into the existing body of Articles 1 through 6. For the most part, extending the coverage of UIFSA (2008) to foreign countries was a satisfactory solution to merge the appropriate Convention terms into this act. In understanding this process, it must be clearly stated that the terms of the Convention are not substantive law.

The Convention is a multilateral treaty which binds the United States and the other Convention countries to assure compliance. As such, it will be the law of the land; but the treaty is not self-executing. See, Medellin v. Texas, 552 U.S. 491, 128 S.Ct. 1346, 170 L.Ed.2d 190 (2008). Thus, the ultimate enforcement of the treaty in the United States is dependent on the key implementing federal law and the enactment of both federal and state legislation which provide the mechanism for enforcing the requirements of the Convention. This act is predicated on the principle that the enactment of UIFSA (2008) in all States and federal jurisdictions will effectively implement the Convention through state law by amending Articles 1 through 6, plus the addition of this article. The treaty, in essence, establishes the framework for a system of international cooperation by emulating the interstate effect of UIFSA for international cases, especially those affected by the Convention.

In relatively few instances, the provisions of the Convention are sufficiently specific that a choice was made between amending UIFSA accordingly, with a disproportionate effect on all support orders enforced under state law, or accommodating potential conflicts by creating a separate article to apply only to Convention support orders. The choice was to draft this article as state law to minimize disruption to interstate support orders, which constitute the vast majority of orders processed under UIFSA. Note that this act is the substantive and procedural state law for: (1) responding to an application for establishment, recognition and enforcement, or modification of a Convention support order; and, (2) initiating an application to a Convention country for similar action.

The four Hague maintenance conventions that preceded the 2007 Convention, and the three prior versions of UIFSA, have common goals. The distinctions between the jurisdictional rules in the common-law tradition in the United States, and the civil law systems in most of the countries that were parties to the earlier maintenance conventions, were obstacles to participation of the United States in any of the multilateral maintenance treaties. As the world has grown smaller and globalization has become the order of the day, reconciling the differences has become more and more important. Understanding the necessity for accommodation has made the task easier. This is not to say easy, as evidenced by the fact that the formal negotiations leading to the final text of the Convention spanned from May, 2003, to November, 2007.

The United States signed the Convention on November 23, 2007 and the Senate gave its advice and consent to ratification in 2010. Enabling federal legislation was enacted on September 29, 2014 which requires all states to enact UIFSA (2008) by the end of 2015. At that point the United States will deposit its instrument of ratification and the Convention will enter into force in the United States.

UIFSA (2008) and the 2007 Convention have far more in common than did former uniform acts and maintenance conventions, and, in fact, many provisions of the Convention are modeled on UIFSA principles. The negotiations demonstrated that it is possible to draft an international convention, which incorporates core UIFSA principles into a system for the establishment and enforcement of child support and spousal-support orders across international borders, and creates an efficient, economical, and expeditious procedure to accomplish these goals. Matters in common, however, go far beyond identical goals. The negotiations provided an opportunity for an extended interchange of ideas about how to adapt legal mechanisms to facilitate child support enforcement between otherwise disparate legal systems.

International cross-border enforcement has been far more important in Western Europe, and more recently, throughout the countries of the European Union than has been the case in the United States. On the other hand, experience with establishment and enforcement of interstate child-support orders in the United States has been building since 1950, and accelerated rapidly with enactment of Title IV-D of the Social Security Act in 1975. Clearly, the issues are far easier to deal with nationally because of the common language, currency, and legal system, and, since 1996, with the Title IV-D requirement that all states enact the same version of UIFSA. In fact, since the advent of UIFSA and Title IV-D, millions of interstate cases have been processed through the child support enforcement system and thousands of support orders from other countries have also been registered and enforced in the United States because UIFSA treated such orders as if they had been entered by one of the states. In the future, in Convention countries, this country's orders will be entitled to similar treatment. The entry into force of the Convention is designed to further improve the process and will most certainly lead in a few years to a substantial increase in international cases, both incoming and outgoing.

To create UIFSA (2008), it was necessary to integrate the texts of UIFSA (2001) and the Convention. This did not present a significant drafting challenge for the most part. By far the most common amendment in Articles 1 through 6 is to substitute "state or foreign country" for the term "state." These simple amendments expanded a majority of this act to cover foreign support orders. In this article statutory directions are given to "a tribunal of this state," and also to a "governmental entity, individual petitioner, support enforcement agency, or a party."