The new regulations will apply initially only to 10 of the EU’s 27 member countries, and will not include the UK, one of the favoured venues for wives in divorce cases due to its history of generous alimony awards.
In a statement issued today, Viviane Reding, who in February took office as the EU’s first-ever commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship, said the new cross-border regulations were intended to end so-called ‘forum shopping’, whereby international couples seeking to divorce often end up in national courts as each seeks to take advantage of the most advantageous jurisdiction, inevitably at the expense of their partner.
"International couples can encounter arbitrary legal problems that turn the tragedy of divorce into a financial and emotional disaster, making peoples’ lives very hard," Reding said in her statement.
"Thousands of couples find themselves in difficult personal situations because national legal systems have so far failed to provide clear answers. In many cases, children and the weaker spouse suffer. I do not want people in the EU to be left to manage complicated international divorces alone. I want them to have clear rules so that they always know where they stand. This is why we decided to move ahead today."
Before the proposed rules may take effect in the 10 countries wishing to adopt them, they will need to be voted on by the 27 EU member states. The European Parliament must also give its consent. No time frame for these votes was given.
13% of divorces
In 2007, there were more than one million divorces in the EU, of which 140,000, or 13%, involved international couples, according to European Commission figures.
The EC defines an international couple as one in which both the husband and wife are either of different nationalities, or of the same nationality but living together either in a different EU country – for example, a British couple living in Spain – or living apart in different countries.
France, Italy and Spain are among the 10 countries that have agreed to abide by the new rules.
The other seven are Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Luxembourg, Romania and Slovenia.
In an interview in today’s Financial Times, Reding is quoted as saying that she expects other EU countries to sign up to the new regulations once the new regime is in place. She also stressed that the new rules were not an attempt to harmonise family law across the EU, the paper noted.
“We are not changing the divorce laws in countries – they stay the same,” the FT quoted Reding as saying.
Countries reluctant to join in the divorce rules harmonisation, in addition to the UK, include Sweden, Poland and the Czech Republic.
Previous effort failed
Today’s effort to put an end to forum shopping comes almost four years after a previous effort led by then-Justice and Home Affairs Commissioner Franco Frattini. His plans were blocked by a number of member states, including Sweden.
Alex Carruthers, a partner in the London law firm Hughes Fowler Carruthers, says the UK is unlikely to go along with Reding’s proposed cross-border harmonisation of divorce rules anytime soon for a number of reasons, the most basic of which is that the very concept of applying another country’s laws in British courts “is alien to the law we have in this country, which states that we’re all equal before the law, whether we’re English, French or Moroccan”.
He notes that the countries willing to sign-up to the harmonisation would already share a common approach and for them therefore "this concept is not alien".
“Secondly, there is also the problem that if you are going to apply a foreign law here, how do you know what that foreign law is, and if you are applying it correctly?”
Yet another problem is that divorce laws designed to work within a particular culture – such as Sweden’s, which has very generous social benefits for unmarried women – would not be appropriate to apply in a country in which women are not as well looked after by the state and thus might be more in need of their ex-husband’s support, he notes.
Before divorce laws may be fairly harmonised, other aspects of EU member countries’ social services systems would need to be brought into line, Carruthers believes.
An EU document providing answers to frequently-asked questions about international divorces may be found at http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=MEMO/10/100&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en.
