A custody fight that had already run more than seven years, through a Family Court, the Delhi High Court, and now the Supreme Court, has ended with the mother cleared to take her two children to the United Kingdom, where she works as a university lecturer, while the father is left without custody for as long as a pending POCSO case against him remains unresolved.
The Family Court had given the father sole custody back in 2024, and the Delhi High Court affirmed that order in January 2026. Both courts had to grapple with a POCSO prosecution pending against the father, and both had, in different ways, commented on how credible they found the allegations behind that FIR. The Supreme Court took issue with exactly that part of the reasoning when the mother appealed.
Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta laid down a clean rule for cases like this one: a parent facing a pending prosecution under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act cannot be treated as entitled to custody, whatever the eventual outcome of that criminal case turns out to be, for as long as the prosecution remains alive. Courts hearing a custody dispute are not the forum to pre-judge a POCSO trial, and they should not lean on their own view of the FIR's merits to decide who gets the child.
That principle cut directly against the Delhi High Court's judgment, which had offered its own assessment of how credible the mother's allegations were. The Supreme Court expunged those observations outright, calling them premature and uncalled for. A custody court forming a view on a pending criminal case's merits, the bench suggested, risks doing exactly the kind of fact-finding that belongs to the trial court hearing the POCSO matter, not to a forum deciding where two children should live.
The second strand of the father's case attacked the mother's own suitability, pointing to her repeated changes of job and residence as evidence of an unstable, almost nomadic life unfit for raising children. The Court rejected that characterisation in blunt terms, describing it as absolutely unjustified and far removed from reality. Career moves driven by a university lecturer's employment, the bench reasoned, are not the same thing as instability, and treating a working mother's job changes as a parenting defect does her an obvious disservice.
Relocation to the UK was granted on the footing that continued separation and litigation were making the underlying parental alienation worse, not better, after seven years of conflict. The Court treated the children's best interests as the controlling consideration throughout, and found that letting the mother take them abroad, where she already has stable employment, served that interest better than keeping the matter unresolved in India while the father's prosecution dragged on.
One thread stays open. The father has a separate petition pending before the Calcutta High Court seeking to quash the FIR underlying the POCSO prosecution. The Supreme Court was careful not to prejudge that petition either, directing that it be decided independently and strictly on its own merits, uninfluenced by anything said in the custody proceedings. If that quashing petition eventually succeeds, the father's position on custody could look very different; until then, the pending prosecution alone is enough to keep custody, and now the children themselves, out of his reach. The ruling leaves family courts with a workable, if uncomfortable, rule for cases where a custody dispute and a criminal prosecution run on parallel tracks. A judge deciding who gets the child is not expected to pronounce on whether the underlying criminal allegation will hold up at trial, and should resist the temptation to do so even where one party pushes hard for exactly that kind of finding to bolster their custody claim. The custody court's job is to weigh the pending prosecution as a fact bearing on the child's safety and welfare, not to referee its evidentiary strength. That separation of roles also protects the accused parent from a kind of double jeopardy in reasoning, where an adverse custody finding effectively prejudges a criminal trial that has not yet taken place, and conversely protects the custodial parent from having to relitigate the criminal allegations a second time merely to secure custody. Each proceeding is left to do its own job: the criminal court decides guilt or innocence, and the family court decides what arrangement serves the children best given the facts, including the fact of prosecution, as they stand at the time. For practitioners handling custody disputes where a POCSO case or any other serious criminal allegation hangs over one parent, this judgment is useful authority against being drawn into arguing the criminal case's merits inside a custody hearing. The safer and, after this ruling, the legally correct course is to let the pending prosecution speak for itself as a factor in the welfare analysis, and to resist any invitation from the bench or the opposing side to turn the custody hearing into a preview of the criminal trial.