EU Family Law

Conference Details

Date: 28 November 2024

Time: 09:00

Duration: 2 days

Location: Luxembourg, 8 rue Nicolas Adames 1114 Luxembourg

Cost: € 970 - € 1140

Organiser: ECJL - European Centre for Judges and Lawyers/EIPA Luxembourg

Conference Website

Conference Description

What constitutes a ‘family’ in the European Union?

The answer to this question is constantly changing and increasingly varied. The standard of what a family looks like – a married, opposite-sex couple that lives with their biological children under the same roof and where the husband is the sole or primary bread-winner – has been eroding for a long time.

The presentations delivered in this course are designed to discuss rapid and substantial changes in family structures, concepts, and values that have emerged in Europe in recent years. Notions of marriage and partnership have been affected by this change: from the increasing recognition of same sex-marriages, the acceptance of private divorce, to the increasing legal protection of partnerships outside marriage.

The overall objective of this course is to introduce the underlying concepts, main institutions, and major regulatory issues of family law both from the Member States’ perspectives and that of the European Union.

The course will focus on

• divorce, matrimonial issues, maintenance, parental responsibility, and successions in the context of Member States’ national legislations;
• the European Union’s regulatory response as well as the contribution of the Court of Justice of the European Union in ensuring a uniform interpretation of the Regulations in this area of the law;
• the treatment of cross-border child relocation cases, which are among the most difficult issues in family law.

What you will learn

The purpose of the course is two-fold:

• to familiarise participants with family law institutions, explaining the major differences in Member States’ legal systems related to family law issues;
• to shed light on the respective policy and legal considerations lying behind the European Union legislation emerging in the field of family law.