On Valentine's Day, the New Hampshire Supreme court rejected a husband's claim that his Islamic divorce a day before his wife filed in New Hampshire should have prevented the New Hampshire trial court from asserting jurisdiction to end their marriage. The case, In the Matter of Sonia Ramadan and Samer Ramadan (NH Sup. Ct., Feb. 14, 2006), is discussed in yesterday's Concord Monitor. Samer Ramadan claimed that he validly divorced his wife under Islamic law by declaring "I divorce you" three times in succession in her presence. He then telephoned an attorney in Lebanon and declared, with two witnesses listening, that he had divorced his wife. Two months later, a religious magistrate in Lebanon issued a decree confirming that divorce. However, the New Hampshire Supreme Court held that the Lebanese decree had no legal effect because both husband and wife were domiciled in New Hampshire when the wife's divorce petition was filed.
The court decided that another issue raised by the husband was moot. The trial court's initial temporary decree had ordered the husband "not [to] speak about the Petitioner as a Muslim/Muslim woman to the children or within hearing of the children." Since that provision was not in the final divorce decree being appealed, the Supreme Court held it did not have to determine whether it amounted to an unconstitutional prior restraint on speech.
