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Abstract:

These days only a limited number of children are privileged to grow up in a family with both legal parents until adulthood. Given the utmost liberal nature of the Belgian divorce law - Belgium features in Europe theshortest legal procedure to divorce, apart from the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands - the barriers to divorce are low and children of cohabiting couples are even more prone to seeing their parents' relationship end. In 2006 for the first time the Belgian legislator left judges few space when judging over residence arrangements and forced them to examine with priority whether an arrangement of co-parenthood could be imposed in case a dispute arises. In the same law, he created a coherent legal framework for coercive measures a parent can benefit from in case the other parent refuses to execute the residence arrangement. This research aimed to evaluate critically the current legislation regarding residence arrangements for minor children after the end of their parents' cohabitation, be it marital or not. Using the method of empirical research of unpublished case law concerning residence arrangements of children, an answer was searched to the question how the judiciary deals with the request for co-parenthood and whether the legislator made the right choice in 2006 to impose the judges to examine a specific residence arrangement with priority.