Well, how does it work in Serbia?

Family Law

Family law is a set of legal rules and norms regulating family relations, that is personal legal relations and proprietary legal relations among family members and their relations with regard to third parties.

Above all, the norms of family law regulate marriage and marriage relations as well as relations between parents and children.

Family relations, regulated by legal norms of family law, represent special social relations which have been given special legal protection in every society, that is every legal system, due to their vital role. The importance of these relations lies in the fact that children are born and brought up in these relations, they ensure survival of the individual and, as a result, of social community, that is they enable fulfillment of biological, emotional and other intimate human needs.

Legal regulations determine the subjects of family relations, conditions of their development, legal effects they have as well as conditions and factors of termination of these relations.

Legal regulations dealing with family law regulate relations between:

• Spouses and common-law spouses;
• Parents and children;
• Guardians and wards;
• Foster parents and wards;
• Adoptive parents and adoptees;
• Maintenance obligors and obligees.

In the Republic of Serbia legally effective act is the Family Law Act (Official Gazette of the Republic of Serbia No. 18 as of 24 February 2005) which regulates the following: conclusion of marriage, dissolution of marriage (annulment and divorce), relations between parents and children, motherhood and fatherhood, parental custody of children, exercising parental rights, suspension of parental rights, extension and termination of parental rights, child adoption, foster parenthood, guardianship, spousal maintenance, property relations between spouses and common-law spouses, property relations between parents and children, protection against domestic violence.

Legal rules of family law are ius cogens, that is strict rules, and the volition of the individual is reduced to a minimum. The reason for this is the fact that family relations are important in every society. Family law is a formalized law, and in its nature it is a status law.