A summer holiday, a school exchange, a medical treatment abroad, a visit to relatives in another country, sooner or later most families face the question of taking a child across the Belarusian border. And almost every parent has heard some version of the same rule: “You cannot leave the country without the other parent’s consent.” […]
A pattern shows up in almost every alimony case that stalls: the father either has no formal job, or has one that shows a suspiciously modest salary while everything about his lifestyle suggests otherwise. Mothers usually reach a family lawyer once the standard percentage-based order has stopped producing money, or the bailiff’s file has been […]
Every year Belarusian civil registration offices formalise hundreds of marriages involving foreign nationals. Some couples come to Minsk from abroad for the ceremony itself, others are already living in the country on a work or study visa, and many are Belarusians whose future spouse holds a foreign passport. The rules apply to all of them […]
When people picture family law, they usually think of divorce, custody battles or maintenance claims. Underneath every one of those disputes, however, sits a quieter question the law has to settle first: who actually counts as a relative, and how exactly are two people connected? Belarusian law does not leave that to intuition. It draws […]
Real estate is almost always the largest asset a couple owns, and when a marriage breaks down it is also the one that generates the sharpest disputes. Foreign clients frequently arrive with the same set of questions: the flat is registered only in my spouse’s name — does that matter? The house was bought with […]
Family breakdown is a mass phenomenon in Belarus, not a rare one: the National Statistical Committee recorded 34,813 divorces in 2025. When a couple separates — or when parents were never married — one question comes up again and again in our practice: can a parent simply walk away? Can a father “renounce” paternity, or […]
Most IT companies that reach out to us about a contract going wrong get to us at roughly the same point. A milestone has slipped, a payment has been withheld against a defect that may or may not be a defect, and somewhere in the background the question of who actually owns the source code […]
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 […]
