Child custody in Guinea

In the French tradition parental authority belongs to both parents, though older codes made the father head of the family. Many countries have reformed this, so check the current code.

The mother has parental authority over a child born outside marriage. The father gains it by acknowledging the child, in many countries together with the mother or by a court decision.

The unmarried father, in one line: Depends on the form of the marriage and on the community.

The court decides custody and contact by the child's interests. A young child often stays with the mother, with contact for the father.

Courts in this tradition hear a child who can understand, and take the child's views into account according to age and maturity.

Where both parents have parental responsibility, taking a child to live abroad generally needs both parents' agreement or a court's permission. Check the rules before any move.

Guinea is a party to the 1980 Hague Child Abduction Convention, which lets a parent ask for a child wrongly taken to another country to be returned. It works only with countries that have accepted its accession, so check the other country on the treaty status table.

• Many families live under customary law, which varies from one community to the next and is often unwritten. In some communities a child belongs to the father's family, in others to the mother's, and the courts increasingly apply the child's best interests whatever the custom says.

Guinea belongs to the Civil law family. Family law grows out of the legal tradition, so it helps to know how the system works.

Read the Guinea legal-system profile in the Legal Families Atlas →
Who owns what in a marriage in Guinea? →

• JuriGlobe, University of Ottawa: world legal systems
• World Bank: Women, Business and the Law (country data on parenthood and marriage)