Last week, the cabinet of the Luxembourg government met and addressed a number of topics, including issues concering family affairs in the Grand Duchy.
The draft bill, which is set to replace the 2003 and 2008 laws, covers the creation of a Family Court specifically for family affairs within the initiative to reform family law and simplyining administrative procedures for the family and children. The bill intends to group a series of areas/skills currently exercised by different judges with judges called "family judges" and to operate as much as possible a simplification and standardisation of procedures.
Secondly, the bill provides for a comprehensive reform of divorce law by abolishing "divorce by fault" and putting in place a procedure for a "pacification of relations" between the spouses, especially in the children's interests. The bill will now provide for two types of divorce, namely divorce by mutual consent and divorce for irretrievable breakdown of marital relations. Although the concept of fault is to be abandoned as a cause of divorce, some serious offenses, defined in relation to criminal offenses specifically listed, will be considered in the context of divorce for irretrievable breakdown, to determine the consequences of divorce. The bill also contains provisions promoting equal treatment of the economic consequences of divorce.
The third part of the bill provides for a comprehensive reform of the legal provisions on parental authority. The project aims to put on an equal footing all parents regardless of their marital status. All provisions relating to parental authority are built around the concept of co-parenting that must extend beyond the break-up. The bill therefore introduces the principle that parents, whether married or not, jointly exercise parental authority.
