FAMIMOVE is back! – FAMIMOVE 3.0 starts on 1 March 2026

FAMIMOVE 3.0 is an international project co-funded by the European Commission under the JUST-2025-JCOO program. The project’s full name is Families on the Move: The Coordination between international family law and migration law.

This project seeks to build on the results of FAMIMOVE 2.0 by focusing on children on the move in vulnerable situations and by consolidating the networks already established of experts in family law, child protection and migration law. It involves 7 universities in 6 EU Member States.

The duration of the project is two years from 1 March 2026 to 29 February 2028.

The Consortium is coordinated by Prof. Marta Pertegás Sender (Maastricht University) and is comprised of the following partners: Prof. Thalia Kruger (Antwerp University), Prof. Orsolya Szeibert (Eötvös Loránd University), Prof. Ellen Desmet (Ghent University), Prof. Ulf Maunsbach (Lund University), Prof. Carlos Esplugues (University of Valencia) and Prof. Fabienne Jault (University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines). They will be supported by colleagues with expertise in these fields from their universities and beyond.

As indicated in the project summary, “FAMIMOVE’s general objective is to contribute to the effective and coherent application of the EU acquis in the field of international family law, in particular by ensuring more awareness of international child protection instruments applicable to migrant children […].”  In particular, FAMIMOVE 3.0 “intends to map the measures for the protection of children in 6 EU MS in family law and their interaction with migration law. In addition, it will put in place three transnational sub-projects relating to the portability of civil status documents (with a focus on statelessness and the age of the child), the interrelationship between international child abduction and migration law, and the protection of Ukrainian children in the EU.”

As part of this project, interviews will be conducted with Ukrainian children in order for them to express their views, which will be duly taken into account, and to fully participate in the results of the project in accordance with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

As indicated, FAMIMOVE 3.0 is a spin-off of earlier projects with the same name, namely FAMIMOVE 2.0 and FAMIMOVE. The website of FAMIMOVE 2.0 is still operational. To view it, click here. One of the main achievements of this project is the book entitled Children in Migration and International Family Law: The Child’s Best Interests Principle at the Interface of Migration Law and Family Law and may be consulted here. We have previously posted on this project here and here.

FAMIMOVE resulted in two insightful documents published by the European Parliament: Children on the Move: A Private International Law Perspective and Private International Law in a Context of Increasing International Mobility: Challenges and Potential.

Any new development will be published here – stay tuned.

Views and opinions expressed in this project are however those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Commission. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.