Formal Marriage Requirement for Marital Property Rights
- Laws
- Benin
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Only marriages formalized by a registrar have legal effect (Art. 126).
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- Vietnam
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Marriages must be registered, and cohabitation between a man and woman as husband and wife is not recognized as a marriage (Art. 11).
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- Ethiopia
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If the irregular union lasts three years or more, property acquired during the irregular union is common property (Family Code, Art. 102 (1)).
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Matters related to administration of common property, payment of debts, and liquidation of common property and maintenance of children are the same as those of a married couple (FC, Art. 103).
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Irregular unions occur when a man and a woman live together as husband and wife without being married (FC, Art. 98)
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To establish an irregular union, the behavior of the man and the woman need be analogous to that of married people (FC, Art. 99).
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- Rwanda
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Article 169 of the Civil Code states that only a monogamous, civil marriage is legally recognized.
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Article 4 of the Organic Land Law states: “Men and women have equal rights over land.”
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- Benin
- Commentary
Early marriages (younger than 18) and polygamous marriages, which are both illegal in Benin, will not be registered. This means that the marital protections in the law will not apply to those who have entered into these types of marriages.
The Ethiopian law provides some alternatives to excluding couples who are not formally married from legal protection. For people who behave as though they are married and do so for three years, the marital property provisions apply. One issue, however, is establishing the beginning of the three-year period.
A broader legal definition for marital property, which includes informal marriage or consensual unions, will protect many more women than a requirement for formal marriage. Many rural men and women do not marry formally because they do not see the benefit (usually because they do not know the law) and it costs time and money.
Note: Even if the law does not presume co-ownership of property for informal unions, in most cases the law does not forbid co-ownership of property for any two or more consulting adults. While women would not, by law, have co-ownership rights to the land used by her and her husband, she could claim a right to the land on other grounds, e.g. they are both using the land and depending on it for their livelihood, etc. In Rwanda, women and men in consensual unions were able to register their land as co-owners, and they did not have to prove their marriage (by producing a marriage certificate), but still many fewer women had their names documented if they did not have a marriage certificate.