The first decade of the 2000s was marked by legislative efforts to improve the recovery of international child support. States adopted international and European legislation with a view to providing legal remedies. Two major instruments are the Convention of 23 November 2007 on the International Recovery of Child Support and Other Forms of Family Maintenance (hereafter the 2007 Convention) and the Council Regulation (EC) No 4/2009 of 18 December 2008 on jurisdiction, applicable law, recognition and enforcement of decisions and cooperation in matters relating to maintenance obligations (hereafter the 2009 Regulation). Both instruments provide for administrative cooperation between central authorities to help applicants to establish a maintenance decision, to have a decision recognised and enforced, or to have a decision modified. They are also far-reaching in providing for free legal aid and requests for specific measures (for instance to help locate a debtor or obtain information on their resources) before an application is submitted.
In spite of these efforts, obstacles inherent in the international character of cross-border maintenance cases remain. As an example, application forms can only be provided in a language that is accepted by the requested central authority. Furthermore, the burden of paper mail (sometimes sent back and forth to provide required additional information) makes the procedure long, cumbersome and costly. Time zone differences across long distances can also make direct communication more difficult.
This has wide-ranging consequences, as there are more than 16 million international couples in the EU and 30 million EU citizens reside outside Europe. This matrimonial mobility inevitably results in an increase in international separation. It is for instance estimated that there are up to a million unrecovered child support cases worldwide. Inevitably, this has an effect on the well-being and development of children whose custodial parents do not receive the child support they are entitled to.
This is where information technology (IT) can play a role, with electronic communication to shorten transmission and digital forms that can easily be displayed in one language or another. In addition, child support cases can be long-lived (until the majority of a child and in certain countries up to 25 years). This results in a large number of transactions, many of which are repeated over time, for instance as the needs of the child and the means of the debtor and creditor vary. Such repeated transactions are easily translated into software and can help to reduce processing time.
As the organisation responsible for the 2007 Convention, the Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCCH) was keen to make sure that IT tools could easily be used to service the convention. A major objective for iSupport was to become the global system supporting international maintenance recovery. Reaching this objective was key for its financial sustainability: a common system means costs can be shared among participants and more participants means less burden on each of them.
Beyond the Members of the European Union where the 2009 Regulation applies, 41 parties are bound by the 2007 Convention (including the European Union and those states bound by the EU’s approval). As 82 states are members of the HCCH, the 2007 Convention and iSupport have the potential to be adopted by a sizeable proportion of the world states.
The ambition was to facilitate the implementation of the 2007 Convention through the use of an electronic tool. Using a single tool, iSupport, for all central authorities also meant that the convention could be implemented more homogeneously. Offering paperless communication would also help with the handling of cases, while multilingual forms would make communication across borders easier.
Digitisation and the availability of data on the treatment of applications would facilitate the production of statistics and therefore give central authorities increased visibility on their activities and potential areas for improvement. All this would contribute to speedier and more efficient recovery of child support. This would generate savings not just immediately for central authorities but also more widely, as creditors would be supported and therefore become less reliant on welfare. In terms of electronic communication, the challenge was to identify a solution that would allow central authorities to manage their own separate databases while communicating securely. The e-CODEX solution, developed in the context of European e-justice, met these needs and was adopted by iSupport as the tool to support its electronic communication. Improving recovery and generating savings could only be achieved, however, if an electronic tool was developed under conditions that would ultimately ensure its adoption by a number of central authorities. As a consequence, iSupport was developed after careful study of the practices and needs of different countries, according to a methodology based on consensus.