Woman campaigns for law change after "agonising" divorce wait

Monday 03 July 2017

An islander who was left in a “complete state of devastation” after being forced to wait three years to legally separate from her husband after the marriage broke down within a few months is campaigning for an overhaul of Jersey’s divorce laws.

Carrie Atkinson got married to the man she believed would be her life partner in June 2014. However, just months into the marriage, she said she realised that something was “not right." Although she took steps to try and rectify the situation, by the end of the year, she felt that her marriage was irretrievably lost.

“I had during this time been attending marriage counselling desperately trying to figure out what had gone wrong and save our marriage. Then I sought legal advice and to find out what my options were… [But] what I did next was not something I ever thought of, as I took being married very seriously. My parents have been married over 36 years, my grandparents were married 40 plus years, so I had been raised understanding the true meaning of marital vows,” Ms Atkinson told Express.

Left feeling that there was no option but to part ways, she consulted with the Citizens Advice Bureau, lawyers, and her local priest in a desperate attempt to start the divorce process - but says she was “devastated” to learn that she wouldn’t be able to at the time due to a time bar governing all Island divorces.

The current law stipulates that married couples must have been together for at least two years and then spend an additional year separated before they’re legally allowed to file for divorce – a rule that does not exist in Guernsey or Scotland.

Pictured: Advocate Barbara Corbett has been campaigning for a long time for reform of the law.

As a result, it’s only now, after an “agonising” three-year wait, that Ms Atkinson has been able to initiate the proceedings. She says she feels, “…punished having to wait so long for an end.” 

She’s now set up an online petition which she hopes to deliver to the States of Jersey. So far, she’s achieved just over a quarter of the signatures she needs.

But Ms Atkinson isn’t the first to have criticised the law. Barbara Corbett, a leading family law advocate, made recommendations in favour of scrapping the time bar altogether in a Law Commission paper on divorce published in 2015.

She said that the Jersey law, which follows English legislation, is antiquated, harking back to a “long time ago” when people didn’t live together prior to marriage. “They wanted to sure-up marriage, they didn’t want people to divorce in a hurry. Of course in those days, people didn’t live together before they got married, so there was slightly more reason to have a three-year bar,” Advocate Corbett explained.

Despite the moves to “protect” the institution of marriage, there is “no statistical evidence to suggest that divorce is any more common in Guernsey than Jersey” – a place where couples can get divorced a week after the wedding, should they so wish. “All public policy arguments fall away really.”

According to Advocate Corbett, divorces can only be granted sooner in the case of, “…exceptional depravity or extreme hardship, but that’s a very very high hurdle so very, very few people can bring a divorce within three years on that basis.”

Judicial separation, however, can be sought before the three-year bar and allows couples to enact financial orders such as division of money and sale of property, but still means that the couple aren’t officially divorced and will have to do so later.

“It just increases people’s costs and means you can’t marry anybody else there’s a third person. It’s just an unnecessary restriction on people.”

Advocate Corbett hopes that the Chief Minister, who announced intentions to consult on divorce law earlier this year, will include divorce reform as one of his priorities whilst also drafting equal marriage legislation. 

In the meantime, Ms Atkinson is urging others to sign her petition. “Marriage should not be entered into lightly and when I took my matrimonial vows I believed I was sharing my future with my life partner, unfortunately this has not been the case and I would like to prevent anyone from experiencing a similar scenario in the future,” she said.