The children did not want to go to their father. The mother does not have to pay the fine, the Constitutional Court said<

The boys are currently 13 and 12 years old. In 2014, the Prague-West District Court determined that they should be with their father from every even Friday to odd Tuesday, and then in a special regime on holidays and public holidays. However, it happened repeatedly that the boys refused to leave their mother. According to her father, she did not influence them sufficiently and did not motivate them - it is said that it is not enough to pack a bag.

The Regional Court in Prague also concluded that the mother was not active in a positive sense as a "educator of minors" and fined her. According to the constitutional judges, although the regional court pursued the desired goal, ie maintaining or deepening the relationship between the children and the father, it chose a disproportionate coercive measure.

Given their age, children can be considered so intellectually and emotionally mature that they are able to realize the impact of their decisions, it is worth finding. There was no evidence that the mother somehow purposefully and systematically influenced their will against their father.

The finding of Judge-Rapporteur Vojtěch Šimíček is available on the court's website here.

According to the Constitutional Court (CC), sanctions under the Act on Special Judicial Proceedings are to be a means of enforcing an obligation imposed by a court, but not a means of enforcing a "violent" change in the expressions of will or desire of minors to contact their father. The regional court must reconsider the case.

Similarly, the US canceled a fine of 9,000 crowns imposed on a mother last year, who allegedly did not hand over her son to her father within the set deadlines. The woman defended herself by saying that she did not hinder the contact of the then twelve-year-old boy with her father. The son said that he himself decided not to go to him. "Courts must always take into account the will of the child, if the child was already at the age when he or she could express that will in a relevant way," the judge-rapporteur Milada Tomková emphasized at the time.