14th-June-2007
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Unmarried couples get equal rights on ‘divorce’ (UK) | |
Quote:
From The Times
June 11, 2007
Unmarried couples get equal rights on ‘divorce’
Frances Gibb, Legal Editor
Cohabiting partners who split up are to get similar rights to divorcing couples under plans to be outlined next month, The Times has learnt.
Unmarried women and men will be able to make claims against their partners to demand lump-sum payments, a share of property, regular maintenance or a share of the partner’s pension when they separate. They will also be able to claim against their partners for loss of earnings if they gave up a career to look after children.
The reforms are to be published by the Law Commission, the Government’s law reform body.It is expected to drop any proposal for a time stipulation, so that only couples who had lived together for, say, two years, could bring a claim; or any bar on childless couples.
Plans that would have made it harder for the partner who stays at home to lodge a claim have also been dropped. Courts will no longer have to be satisfied that the unmarried couple jointly decided that one of them should give up their career and stay at home and that the decision was not made just by one of them.
At present, cohabiting partners have no financial rights if their relationship breaks down, regardless of how long they have lived together. If there are children in the relationship, the partner who has residency will get child maintenance but can make no other claims.
The proposed reforms will offer legal remedies to up to two million cohabiting couples.
Ministers have indicated that they favour reform, but there is no definite slot for legislation. However, there is mounting pressure for unmarried couples to have greater legal recognition: in April the House of Lords ruled that if an unmarried couple owned a house in joint names, the assumption should be that they owned it in equal shares.
The Law Commission reforms aim to strike a delicate balance: they seek to give cohabitees who break up protections similar to those for divorcing couples, but to stop short of automatic rights to a financial share. This means that the courts would have the same discretion to award maintenance payments, a lump sum or share of the property – but the right is not automatic.
A cohabitee will still have to show that he or she has suffered or would suffer financially as a result of the split, so claims after short relationships are likely to fail, and those where there are children are most likely to succeed.
| Link to full article.
~ A man needs a woman like a lion needs a stove. ~
~ Women deserve only equal opportunity, not equal outcomes. ~
~ Men are not collectively "guilty" of anything. ~
~ Never needing to be pregnant is a blessing. ~
~ Feminist ideology “men have to respect women, but women have no reason to respect men” ~
~ Everybody makes choices, and nobody should be entitled to special treatment because of those choices.
Equal results based on unequal treatment amounts to no kind of equality at all. ~
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