How Hong Kong law ensures kids’ well-being when divorced parents split locations

South China Morning Post · Feb 26, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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I have a habit of re-watching movies during festive times. As we entered the Year of the Horse, one movie that I watched again during Chinese New Year was Marriage Story, a legal drama released on streaming platforms in 2019.The story centres on the divorce of the two lead characters and the resulting legal battle over the custody of their son. The film received rave reviews, earning six Oscar nominations, including for Laura Dern, who clinched the best supporting actress award for her performance as an aggressive family law attorney.Charlie (Adam Driver), a successful theatre director with his own company in New York, and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson), a talented actress, are facing marital problems. When Nicole receives an acting role for a television series in Los Angeles that she considers too good to turn down while Charlie is about to make his Broadway debut, the couple decide to part ways.Nicole takes their son with her to Los Angeles, initially on a temporary basis. When Charlie flies to Los Angeles to visit his son, he finds himself suddenly served with court documents prepared by Nicole’s divorce lawyer (Dern).Nicole declares to Charlie that she intends to keep their son in Los Angeles on a permanent basis and not return him to New York. A bitterly fought legal process to adjudicate whether the child should remain in Los Angeles with his mother or go back to New York to live with his father ensues.In the past few years, many friends have asked me, mostly out of curiosity, whether a parent can relocate children away from Hong Kong without the other parent’s consent.Our law does not allow a parent to unilaterally move his or her children to live in a place outside Hong Kong in the absence of the other parent’s permission. As the mainland is a different legal jurisdiction from Hong Kong, this applies equally to any plan to relocate the children to start a new life in another city in China.