Infocenter

This week the Supreme Court will hear over 120 cases. In the appeal the Supreme Court will discuss the validity of the current form of the lawyer’s request. The Supreme Court will study the peculiarities of the access control for lawyers entering the Ministry of Justice. Federal judge candidate from Yaroslavl will appeal the unsatisfactory mark for judicial exam. The economic board will decide who will pay the damages for the cargo confiscated by the customs service.

Civil board will hear 22 cases. One of them is as follows:

- Anna Ovrazhkina died and left a legacy, namely, a small cottage near Sochi and a plot of land about 1,400 square meters. Two daughters of the deceased, Alla Ivashkina (her mother bequeathed her all her property) and Ksenia Zaretskaya have started a dispute about this property. Shortly before her death Ovrazhkina presented a plot of land and the house to Ivashkina, but after Zaretskaya’s appeal the court declared the deal invalid. Then Ivashkina filed a request to the court to recognize her acceptance of the above-mentioned property as an inheritance and transfer of the property rights to her as of the date her mother had died. Zaretskaya filed a counterclaim and asked to recognize her sister as an illegal heir and give the property rights for the house and the plot of land to her. The Lazarevsky District Court of Sochi left the case without consideration and made a statement that such a dispute shall be heard in the procedure of action proceedings(case file No. 2-1827/2016 ~ М-2251/2016). In this case the dispute cannot be solved by mere fact finding as the plaintiff and the defendant have a specific dispute about rights - the first instance has explained. The appeal has left the decision unchanged. The Supreme Court will now study how reasoned the decisions of the lower court are.

Galina Pavlova, Managing Partner and Head of the Family and Succession Law at Pavlova & Partners Law Firm:

“In my opinion, in this inheritance case the problem is mostly of procedural nature. In fact, a claim was filed, it was not an application for fact finding, especially since the court accepted the counterclaim. I suppose that the Supreme Court will cancel the judicial decisions of the lower court, and send the case to primary jurisdiction court for hearing on the merits. As far as the demands are concerned, the main issue is evident to remain the validity of the will (of course, if the defendant raises this question). In practice we often have cases when the heir has both a deed of gift and a will for the same object”.

Source: https://pravo.ru/news/view/145941/