International jurisdiction in succession matters under the treaty on legal assistance and legal relations in civil, family and criminal matters between Ukraine, The Republic of Lithuania, and EU succession regulation
Date Issued |
---|
2022 |
One of the basic categories of the Private International Law of Succession is jurisdiction. This article concerns the doctrinal and conceptual issues of the determination of international jurisdiction in succession matters based on the Treaty on Legal Assistance and Legal Relations in Civil, Family and Criminal Matters between Ukraine and The Republic of Lithuania and the EU Succession Regulation. Chapter 1 of this paper considers the determination of jurisdiction in relation to the Treaty on Legal Assistance, where the notions “last permanent place of residence” and “last habitual place of residence” are compared, due to the two authentic languages of the Treaty. The concept of “habitual residence” under the EU Succession Regulation is proposed to be the one used for the interpretation of the aforementioned terms. Chapter 2 of this paper is devoted to the determination of jurisdiction under the EU Succession Regulation, where the general jurisdiction as well as forum necessitatis, subsidiary jurisdiction, and other types of jurisdictions are described. In Chapter 3 of this paper, the jurisdictional approaches of the Treaty on Legal Assistance are compared with the ones used by the EU Succession Regulation, where key differences – such as the EU Succession Regulation not dividing jurisdiction based on the type of property – are described. Before the conclusions are given, the jurisdictional provisions of the Treaty on Legal Assistance and the EU Succession Regulation are compared, and thus recommendations for the amendments of Ukrainian Private International Law are proposed. These recommendations include the following: treatment of succession property as a whole, introduction of the “last habitual residence” universal category into Ukrainian legislation, and other proposals.