The Court of Appeals (CA) has turned down a husband’s petition seeking for recognition of a foreign divorce.
This comes after the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG) proved that the petitioner’s wife, who left him in 2011 for Canada and has been living with another man since then, was not yet a Canadian citizen when she filed for and was subsequently granted with her divorce petition there in 2018.
The husband initially filed a petition for recognition of a foreign divorce granted to his former wife, which was subsequently granted by a Regional Trial Court (RTC) on July 26, 2022.
However, on June 11 this year, the CA reversed and set aside the RTC ruling as it granted the petition for review filed by the government through the OSG.
When the appeal of the government through the OSG was denied by the RTC, a petition for review was filed by government lawyers before the CA.
The OSG then asserted that the husband failed to prove that his wife was a Canadian citizen when she filed for divorce.
The Solicitor General noted that “domicile does not prove citizenship” and since the wife’s citizenship was not established “the presumption is that she is still a Filipino citizen.”