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• The role of de facto separation in the divorce law of EU Member States

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  Edit Hadházi

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  De facto separation (means spouses are living apart) as the most spectacular sign of the irretrievable breakdown of a marriage is a legally relevant fact in the (national) divorce law of the most European Union Member States. However, there are notable differences in the regulatory methods used and how much importance is attached to it. There are Member States where the quantity and quality of the separation is regulated at the legislative level, either as an explicit precondition for divorce or as a legal circumstance orienting the judge, and there are Member States where separation plays a role solely or mostly in the process of the application of the law. My hypothesis is that the fact of separation is such a common intersection of the divorce law of the EU Member States that the legal attitudes taken by them in this regard require a comparative analysis of the law. The aim of this paper is to examine that how the EU Member States incorporate the fact of separation into their divorce law, to classify the regulation methods ’from legislation to application', and to draw the final conclusions in a summary.