The paperwork involved in divorce is daunting, all the more so when key original documents cannot be found. The Courts must be provided with the relevant paperwork, and the initial stages of a divorce are much more time consuming without the original marriage certificate.

However, we do often see situations with clients who no longer have marriage certificates; such situations complicated further where the marriage has taken place in another jurisdiction.

The High Court considered this month a similar situation in relation to a missing Decree Absolute. The Decree Absolute is the certificate issued by the Court once the divorce has concluded.

In the case of Power v Vidal [2019] EWHC 2101 (Fam) an ex-husband wanting to remarry was required to present the original decree absolute to the Court. He could not produce it, and so applied to the Court for a certified copy, only for the Court itself to discover, after extensive searches of numerous offices and archives that the original file had been wrongly destroyed.

The ex-wife had since emigrated to Australia, but was nevertheless contacted in the hope that a copy had been retained there. It transpired that if there was such a copy it would be in a storage facility 1000 miles from the ex-wife’s home. The Court, perhaps in an attempt to make up for their own mistake, arranged for the ex-wife to travel the 1000 miles to attempt to retrieve it.

Upon successful retrieval of the copy, the Court still found itself in the position of the original no longer being in existence, a position from which remarriage would be impossible for the ex-husband.

Given the Court’s overall discretion it was declared by Mr Justice Mostyn that the copy be deemed a sufficient copy for the purposes of proving the initial divorce. However, this does emphasise the need to keep Decrees Absolute safe once the divorce has concluded.

In the event a marriage certificate is lost and cannot be found there are a number of steps we would undertake on your behalf to ensure we can progress your divorce as soon as possible;

  1. An application for a certified copy to the General Register Office, subject to but a small fee;
  2. An application – including payment in the local currency – to the equivalent overseas body, where marriage took place in a foreign jurisdiction, and having it translated and formally approved; and
  3. In the event that we were not able to obtain a copy certificate, or it was being retained by a spouse (in the hope this would prevent divorce proceeding) we would make an application to the Court to file the divorce petition without the marriage certificate, subject to a Court fee of only £155. This would need to set out, with evidence, all the steps taken to obtain and retrieve the certificate. This would be done as soon as possible and filed with the divorce petition itself.

With the help of our family team, your lost documents may not be the end of the world.