Dad can meet son at mall, not court, says Supreme Court

A father was told he could only see his son inside a courtroom. The Supreme Court said: take him to the mall instead.

The order was short, almost casual. But the image it left behind was anything but: a child, every Sunday, walking into a courthouse to meet his father. Not a park. Not a restaurant. Not the mall. A courtroom — with its metal detectors, its echoing corridors, the sound of footsteps on hard floors, a child's hand on the courthouse door. The Family Court in Kerala thought this was fine. The Kerala High Court agreed. But when the matter reached the Supreme Court, two judges looked at the arrangement and asked a question that seems obvious only after someone asks it: what kind of childhood is this?

When a courtroom became a playground

The case — Adarsh C.B. v. Aswathy Sidharthan — began with a custody dispute between a husband and wife in Kerala. Like thousands of such disputes across India, the Family Court tried to balance the rights of both parents while keeping the child at the centre. The Family Court, in an order dated 10.11.2023 (presumably 10.11.2022 given the procedural timeline), granted the father visitation rights — but only on Sundays, and only within the court premises. From 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., the father could see his son. But the boy could not leave the building.

The father challenged this restriction. He went to the Kerala High Court at Ernakulam via OPFC No. 665/2022, arguing that a courthouse was no place for a child to spend time with a parent. The High Court did not agree. On 10.01.2023, it declined to interfere with the Family Court's order, seeing no reason to alter a decision that was made in the child's best interest — or so the lower courts believed.

The father's last stop

Unwilling to accept that his son's Sundays would be spent inside a courtroom, the father filed a Special Leave Petition — a request for the Supreme Court to hear an appeal against a High Court decision — before the Supreme Court. The case was numbered SLP(C) 2437/2023. The bench consisted of Justice A.S. Bopanna and Justice Manoj Misra. The date was October 3, 2023.

The father's argument was simple: the court environment was not conducive to a child's well-being. A child should not grow up associating his father with judges, lawyers, and the formal machinery of the law. The mother, through her counsel, defended the existing arrangement. The Family Court had ordered it. The High Court had confirmed it. There was no reason to change it.

Why the court changed the venue

The Supreme Court did not spend long on the legal technicalities. Instead, the bench focused on the child. The court observed that when granting visitation rights, the environment in which the visitation happens is material to the child's welfare. The court held, in its ratio decidendi — the binding principle of the decision — that "repeated visitation in court premises is not in the interest of the child, as the court environment is not conducive to the child's well-being."

The bench did not merely criticise the existing arrangement. It changed it. The court modified the visitation order suo motu — acting on its own motion, without being asked by either party — and directed that the father's visitation would now take place at the entrance of RP Mall in Kollam. The hours were reduced from five to three — 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. — but the venue was transformed. The mother was to hand over the child at the mall entrance on Sundays at 11 a.m. The father would return the child at the same spot at 2 p.m.

The principle behind the mall

The judgment did not create a new law. It applied an existing principle — the welfare of the child is paramount in all custody and visitation matters. This principle, often described as the "welfare of child principle", runs through the Guardians and Wards Act, 1890, and through decades of Supreme Court precedent. What the judgment did was give that principle a concrete, almost startling application: a child's welfare includes the right to meet a parent in a normal, neutral, child-friendly space, not in a courtroom.

The court did not stop at changing the venue. It kept the matter pending for further consideration, listing it for October 31, 2023. This means the larger custody dispute remains alive. But the visitation arrangement — the immediate, weekly reality for this child — was fundamentally altered by a bench that refused to accept that a courthouse was good enough for a child's Sunday.

The procedural journey: three courts, three outcomes

The case travelled through three tiers of the Indian judiciary. At the first level, the Family Court in Kerala, on November 10, 2022, granted visitation rights but confined them to the court premises — a decision that prioritised supervision and safety over the child's developmental needs. The father challenged this before the Kerala High Court at Ernakulam, which on January 10, 2023, declined to interfere, effectively endorsing the Family Court's view that court-premises visitation was acceptable. It was only at the Supreme Court, on October 3, 2023, that the arrangement was fundamentally rethought. The Supreme Court modified the visitation order, replacing the courthouse with a public mall, and kept the Special Leave Petition pending for further orders.

What this means for family courts

For practitioners, the message is clear. Family courts across India routinely order visitation inside court premises, often for practical reasons — it is neutral ground, it is supervised, it is safe. But this judgment signals that safety and neutrality are not enough. The venue must also be developmentally appropriate for the child. A courtroom, with its adversarial atmosphere and formal procedures, is not a place for a child to build a relationship with a parent.

The Supreme Court's order did not specify the child's age, but the logic applies regardless: a child's association with a parent should be built in spaces that feel normal, not institutional. The court's choice of a mall — a neutral public venue — reflects a broader understanding that the environment of visitation is as important as the fact of visitation itself. The reduced hours — from five to three — also suggest that quality of time matters more than quantity, especially when the venue itself has been transformed.

THE PLAY: When seeking or opposing visitation orders, argue that the venue must be a neutral, child-friendly space — a park, a mall, a community centre — and that court premises should be a last resort, not a default. Cite the Adarsh C.B. v. Aswathy Sidharthan principle: the environment of visitation is material to the child's welfare.

The child will now meet his father at the mall entrance. He will walk past shops and food courts, not courtrooms and security checks. He will see his father as a parent, not as a litigant. The Supreme Court did not give him a new father. It gave him a new place to meet the one he already had.