Family law conference – Bucharest 2023.
In mid-November 2023, another family law conference organized by the International Academy of Family Lawyers (IAFL) was held, this time in neighboring Romania, in Bucharest. Our lawyers, Damjana Pavleski and Aleksandar Pavleski, attended this conference as the only representatives from the Republic of Serbia.
The conference gathered around 50 family lawyers from many European countries, many of whom are among the most prominent experts in the field of domestic and international family law. This was a great opportunity for our lawyers Aleksandar Pavleski and Damjana Pavleski to reconnect with family lawyers from different jurisdictions with whom they cooperate in international family law cases, and to make valuable connections with other family lawyers from all over Europe.
Some of the topics covered the Conference were:
- Interim measures and their effectiveness in different countries
- Important facts about family law in different countries regarding the enforcement of court decisions
- What is the most important thing to know when representing a client in procedures for determining the amount of support and ways to determine the amount of child maintenance
- New international regulations on Family law – the proposal of new solutions of the European Commission regarding the determination of paternity in proceedings with an international element and the new Brussels II regulations related to the conflict of regulations in family law between members states
Bearing in mind that this conference covered very important topics that our lawyers encounter every day in their practice and in which they have plenty of experience, our lawyer Aleksandar Pavleski had the opportunity to publicly discuss on both conference days about legal solutions in Serbian family law and their practical application.
The general impression is that court proceedings in Serbia take a very long time and that the waiting period for interim measures is perhaps the longest in Europe. However, Serbian law knows some rather interesting solutions, which have aroused the interest of family lawyers from other countries and given them ideas for influencing the modification of judicial practice in their countries regarding certain problems.
On the other hand, we had the opportunity to hear that some countries have very creative and advanced rules in procedures where the rights of minors are decided. Thus, Estonia has an unusual rule regarding the child’s participation in court proceedings – to “hear the child’s voice” during the court proceedings, Estonia also provides a third lawyer, a lawyer for the minor child, who participates in the proceedings on an equal footing with the parents’ lawyers. On the other hand, for example, Poland has a calculator for calculating the amount of maintenance, where each parent can enter the parameters used in that country when determining alimony to know the approximate amount they should pay in the name of maintenance.
These are very valuable knowledge for our lawyers because they gain breadth in understanding every legal problem they encounter, but also offer the possibility of indirect influence on changing judicial practice in the future in very important aspects of family law.
