Interstate & international custody.

The child’s home state: where the child lived with a parent for at least six consecutive months, 182 days, before the case began, counting temporary absences. That state has jurisdictional priority under the Uniform Child-Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement Act, which Colorado has adopted. In a mobile family the calendar is the strategy: where the six-month clock stands on filing day often matters more than anything argued afterward.

Not immediately. A left-behind parent preserves the prior state’s home-state status for six months after the move, so a relocating parent cannot manufacture jurisdiction by arriving somewhere new and filing. And a parent who wrongfully removes or retains a child to create jurisdiction faces mandatory declination and fee awards. Filing first, in the right court, sets the forum for years; filing in the wrong one buys delay and a dismissal.

Generally not while a parent or the child still lives in Colorado with a significant connection and substantial evidence here. The state that entered the initial order keeps exclusive continuing jurisdiction to modify it; another state cannot modify the order merely because the child now spends more time there, and the issuing court generally must first determine that it has lost jurisdiction or that the other forum is more convenient.

A narrow door. A Colorado court may take temporary emergency jurisdiction over a child present here who has been abandoned or needs protection from mistreatment or abuse, but the jurisdiction is temporary by design: the court must confer with the home state and set deadlines, and emergency orders ripen into permanent ones only in defined circumstances. The court where the child happens to be can act to protect the child, briefly. It does not get to decide the case.

Register it. Colorado registers and enforces conforming orders from other states on an expedited track: a hearing on the next judicial day after service in an enforcement proceeding, a warrant for the child’s physical custody where serious harm or removal from the state is imminent, and fees to the prevailing party. Ignoring the other state’s order does not work; registering it does.

Abduction-prevention measures, sought in the first motion rather than the last: passport surrender, travel bonds, supervised exchanges, and specific travel restrictions in the order, available on a credible risk of abduction. Foreign-country orders are enforced in Colorado when rendered in substantial conformity with the Act’s standards, and for international families this framework runs alongside the Hague Convention, which has its own deadlines and defenses. Days matter; call before you act.

No. The inconvenient-forum factors let a court with jurisdiction decline it in favor of a better one: domestic violence and which court can best protect the parties, the distance, the parties’ finances, where the evidence about the child lives, and how familiar each court is with the facts. The doctrine is unforgiving of shortcuts in both directions; Colorado courts have voided orders entered after jurisdiction was relinquished carelessly.

Map the clocks. Where the child has lived for the last six months, when any move happened, whether an order exists anywhere and whether a parent or the child still lives in that state. Jurisdiction is decided first and on facts, and a petition filed in the right court on the right day is worth more than any argument made after.