Dozens of divorce applications were wrongly approved due to a computer error, the high court has heard.
A hearing in London on Wednesday was told that 79 divorces were incorrectly approved after the applications were submitted a day before the law allows. An online system failed to detect that the submissions came a year after marriage, when the law only permits divorces from a year and a day.
Lawyers for the justice secretary have asked the court to rule that the divorces are “voidable” as opposed to “void”, meaning they would still stand, claiming that voiding the divorces would have “highly unfortunate and highly unwelcome” consequences for the couples concerned.
The court was told that between April 2022, when the validation system of the online portal was introduced, and April 2024, a total of 96 divorce applications were made on the first anniversary of marriage. Of these, a final divorce order was granted in 79 cases.
None of the divorcees appeared at the hearing and were not represented. The court heard that several respondents had expressed “significant distress” in the possibility they may not be legally divorced from their former partners. Some of the divorcees had either since remarried or were planning to, the court heard.
In a written submission, Sir James Eadie KC said the undoing of final divorce orders had “significant legal and practical consequences”. If the orders are void, he added, the impact would be significant on those who had either remarried or had financial orders after the affected divorces.
He said: “The undoing of final divorce orders has the consequence that separated couples who were, and thought they were, divorced will be held to still be married.”
Eadie said of the system’s error, “If there was a flaw, it was a genuine system flaw” , adding that it was a “minor kind” and that all the cases met the criteria for divorce.
The judgment will be given in writing at a later date.
Earlier this year, the wrong couple were divorced by mistake after a computer error made by solicitors at a leading law firm. However, the order was not overturned.
Lawyers mistakenly used an online portal to apply for a final divorce order for a couple when they had intended to apply for divorce for another client. The order, granted through the online system, divorced the wrong couple within 21 minutes.
