Joint will of spouses in the private international law of the Russian Federation

The study focuses on the institution of the joint will of spouses, its background in the Russian private international law. The emergence of this institution is associated with the desire of the rule-making bodies to bring a great experience of regulating inheritance relations through special legal institutions into domestic law. This initiative is due to the objective reasons. When Crimea and the federal city of Sevastopol, where the Ukrainian law was applicable, were annexed to the Russian Federation, it was necessary to establish Russian legislation within their territory. However, deals, namely wills, which were concluded before the annexation, were under the previous legislation, and their subsequent regulation was subject to the Russian legislation. Joint wills of spouses were applicable in the Ukrainian law, and such wills were lawful on the territory of Crimea and Sevastopol. However, the commencement of succession provoked debates about the validity of the joint wills of spouses and their further execution by virtue of paragraph 4 of Article 1118 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation which explicitly prohibits to execute a will by several persons. The above-mentioned differences in Russian and Ukrainian legislation lead to the conflict of private law in the field of inheritance. This conflict resolution is the primary task of international private law. In order to extend the testator’s posthumous will, the Draft Law No. 801269-6 on Making Amendments to Parts 1, 2, 3 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation as well as Certain Legal Documents of the Russian Federation (Concerning the Improvement of Inheritance Law) was introduced in the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation in 2015. The legislation of a number of foreign countries became the ideological and theoretical basis for the draft law.