Desultory Remarks on the Legislative Improvement of the Russian Federation in the Field of Cross-Border Marriage and Family Relations

Abstract

Introduction: Russian society is regularly shaken by the reports of the Russian families who have left for permanent residence abroad. It is shocking that abroad, as it turns out, for one reason or another, often far-fetched, it is possible to withdraw children from the family and commit them to more trustworthy, if it seems so to the competent authorities, adoptive parents, to accuse a mother of kidnapping her own child, if she took the child to Russia, to refuse the recognition of the validity of marriages if they were concluded in the territory of this country, etc. All these cases show that the legal regulators that exist in that regard in Russia do not clearly work in other states and do not create sufficient guarantees of respect for the rights of Russian nationals. In this regard, the purpose of the paper is to consider the current state and prospects of normative improvement of the domestic norms of private international law in the regulation of cross-border family and marriage relations. Methods: the research is based on the use of logical, dialectical techniques and methods of scientific knowledge, comparative legal and legal-technical analysis of wording of normative acts and materials of the law enforcement practice. The study was the analysis of Russia’s participation in the standardized agreements both of conflict and substantive nature in the field of international marriage and family relations and the status of the national law in this area. The results of the review became the basis for the conclusion that the Russian legislator was not sufficiently attentive to the processes of international unification and harmonization of the norms governing marriage and family relations with a foreign element. In this regard, the proposals were made to improve the current domestic family law and the acts of law enforcement practice.