Supreme Court holds foreign divorce on irretrievable breakdown not enforceable in India

The Supreme Court ruled that a foreign divorce decree granted on the ground of irretrievable breakdown cannot be enforced in India under Section 13 of the Code of Civil Procedure. In a bigamy case, proceedings against the husband's parents and second wife were quashed, while the case against him continues.

The Supreme Court has held that a divorce decree granted by a foreign court on the ground of irretrievable breakdown of marriage cannot be enforced in India. The Court reached this view by applying Section 13 of the Code of Civil Procedure, which sets out the conditions under which a foreign judgment is treated as conclusive between the parties. The ruling came in a bigamy case with an unusual set of facts.

The couple had married in India in a ceremony governed by their personal law. Some years later, a court in Cambridge in the United Kingdom granted a divorce decree in 2014. The husband subsequently remarried in Norfolk, and the first wife then pursued criminal proceedings alleging bigamy. The question before the Court was whether the foreign decree could be treated as a valid dissolution of the Indian marriage for the purposes of Indian law.

Section 13 of the Code provides that a foreign judgment is conclusive unless it falls into certain exceptions. These include cases where the judgment was not given on the merits, where it is founded on a view of international law or a refusal to recognise Indian law that was applicable, where the proceedings were opposed to natural justice, where it was obtained by fraud, or where it sustains a claim founded on a breach of Indian law. The Court examined the decree against these tests.

The Court's conclusion was that a decree based on irretrievable breakdown does not meet the standard when the marriage was solemnised under Indian personal law. Under the statute governing such marriages, irretrievable breakdown is not by itself a statutory ground for divorce, although the Supreme Court has in some cases used its special constitutional powers to dissolve marriages on that basis. A foreign court applying a ground that Indian statute does not recognise, the Court indicated, cannot bind the parties here as of right.

The Bench also dealt with the position of the husband's relatives. The proceedings against his parents and his second wife were quashed, with the Court finding that the allegations against them did not justify continuing the prosecution. The case against the husband himself will go ahead, which means the trial court will now examine whether the offence of bigamy is made out on the evidence.

The distinction is important. Criminal liability for bigamy depends on whether a person marries again while the first marriage subsists. If the foreign decree is not recognised in India, the first marriage may be treated as continuing, which strengthens the complainant's case. The relatives, on the other hand, were not parties to the second marriage in the same sense, and the Court was not persuaded that their role warranted prosecution.

Legal practitioners say the ruling has practical consequences for the large number of Indian families with ties abroad. Many people obtain divorces in the country where they live, often on a no-fault basis, and then assume the decree is valid everywhere. The decision is a reminder that a second marriage in India, or in another jurisdiction, may carry legal risks if the first marriage was solemnised here and the foreign ground is not one recognised by Indian law.

At the same time, family law specialists note that the ruling does not close every avenue. Parties who want certainty can seek a decree from an Indian court or obtain mutual consent divorce, which is recognised under the relevant statutes. The judgment leaves open how different grounds and different facts will be handled in future cases, and further clarification may come as lower courts apply the principle to disputes that differ in detail.