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Alimony Payments

Each child has a right to claim support from both parents. For this reason each parent must contribute to his/her children’s keep according to his/her personal situation and financial possibilities.

This duty of the parents is part and parcel of the UNCRC (art. 6 and 27). Signatory States – and that includes Switzerland – have taken it upon themselves to secure the collection of alimony payments within their respective territory and abroad (art. 27, para 4 of CRC). This legal basis is additionally bolstered by both national and international law (see our ethical and legal standards/guidelines).

A parents’s refusal to make alimony payments often is caused by a deeply-rooted conflict between parents concerning custodianship and the right of direct personal contact (see Parental Rights and Child Abduction): retention of alimony payments due to a child is frequently caused by the fact that the "debtor" no longer has any contact to his/her child(ren), or the frustration about the handling of his/her right to such direct personal contacts.

If parents live in different countries, or far away from one another, as well as in different cultural environments, this will obviously exasperate problems related to keeping parent-children relations going and seriously affect the will to make maintenance payments. As a consequence, ISS does not treat the question of alimony payments as a stand-alone issue but something to be regarded as part of the entire situation the family is in, whereby the parent-child relation is given privileged consideration.

Our Activities:

  • ISS provides social, legal and administrative information needed to collect alimony for a Swiss child from a debtor abroad and vice-versa;
  • ISS introduces an alimony debtor to his/her pertinent duties and responsibilities and tries to arrange for regular payments;
  • ISS tries to shed light on the debtor’s personal situation and financial possibilities in order to better understand his/her reasoning for withholding alimony payments;
  • ISS enters into a dialogue with each of the parents in order to bring to light what kind of a conflict is at the root of payments being withheld in order to work out an amicable arrangement outside of official channels, thereby avoiding drawn-out negotiations which quite often cannot be brought to a satisfactory conclusion;
  • by way of direct dialogue or by transnational family mediation ISS tries to revitalize severed contacts.