When people marry in Belarus, the law treats most things they build together as joint marital property, split equally on divorce. Gifts and inheritance are the striking exception to that rule. If a spouse receives an apartment from their parents, inherits a summer house from a grandparent, or is handed a car as a birthday […]
A creditor with a Belarusian debtor has, in most cases, three years. Three years from the moment the right was breached — typically the day after the contractual payment deadline — to bring the claim to court. Article 197 of the Civil Code sets the period. Miss it, and the underlying debt doesn’t disappear, but […]
When parents separate or divorce, one of the most emotionally difficult questions is where the children will live. Belarusian family law approaches this question through a specific legal framework designed to place the child’s interests above the wishes of either parent. This article explains how child residence disputes are resolved under the Marriage and Family […]
You have a foreign arbitral award. ICC. LCIA. SCC. ICAC. A BelCCI award seated outside Belarus. The institution doesn’t matter for this — the award is final and ready to go. The Belarusian debtor has assets in Minsk: bank accounts, real estate, accounts receivable, equipment in a warehouse somewhere. You want to bring the award […]
A dispute with a Belarusian counterparty. Your contract gives you a clean route to arbitration — IAC at BelCCI, three to six months, full procedural rigour, court decision enforceable in over 170 countries under the New York Convention. Tempting. And sometimes the wrong move. Some commercial disputes settle better, faster, and cheaper at the mediation […]
Four containers under a multi-year supply contract with a buyer in Minsk. Three paid on time. The fourth landed two months ago and the €180,000 invoice is still sitting open. Replies from the buyer have slowed to weekly, then biweekly. The last call ended with vague references to “quality concerns” that nobody mentioned the day […]
Most foreign creditors who reach out to us about a Belarusian debtor arrive at the same moment. The judgment is in. The lawyers got paid. The board got the email confirming the win. And then — nothing. Three weeks have passed. Five. Two months. The money that was supposed to land somewhere has decided not […]
Foreign general counsel evaluating a dispute with a Belarusian counterparty arrive at the same fork most cross-border litigators recognize: the contract has — or should have — an international arbitration clause, and the question becomes which institution to choose. The familiar shortlist is ICC in Paris, LCIA in London, and the Arbitration Institute of the […]
A foreign engineering company is finalising a multi-year supply contract with a Belarusian industrial buyer. Procurement is happy. Commercial terms are clean. The in-house lawyer in Vienna, who picked up the file on a Friday afternoon, opens what she thinks will be a forty-five-minute job — run the counterparty against a sanctions list, send the […]
Picture a situation most of our foreign clients have been in at least once. You’ve got a Belarusian buyer, a multi-shipment supply contract, and three tranches that went fine. The fourth arrives, the buyer discovers a quality issue (or says they did), withholds payment on that batch, and then — while they’re at it — […]
The dispute resolution clause is the paragraph nobody reads at signing and everybody needs when something breaks. By the time the contract is on the litigation lawyer’s desk, the question of where this fight is going to happen is already decided — by language a procurement manager pasted in two years earlier from a template. […]
The bank told you it cannot release the financing without a Belarusian legal opinion. The buyer’s counsel mentioned, late in the SPA negotiation, that a legal opinion from a local advocate would need to sit in the closing bible. The regulator asked for one as part of an authorisation. In each of these moments, a […]
