Divorce by mutual agreement

Our legal system does not recognize a divorce “by agreement.” A marriage is dissolved by a court based on a petition filed by one of the spouses. The other spouse may express their consent to the divorce in their statement on the petition, which shortens and simplifies the entire process. If you are in agreement regarding the divorce, it is likely that the court will dissolve your marriage at a single hearing.

Slovak family law does not recognize so-called absolute grounds for divorce, where the court must dissolve the marriage. Unlike our neighbors in the Czech Republic, under Slovak legislation, it is not possible to submit a divorce agreement to the court. It is exclusively at the discretion of the court to assess whether the substantive legal grounds established by law for the divorce of a marriage are met—i.e., the marriage can no longer fulfill its purpose and the restoration of marital cohabitation cannot be expected from the spouses. If the court concludes that these prerequisites are not met, it will dismiss the petition for divorce.

In any case, it is necessary for one of the spouses to file a petition for divorce with the competent court. In the first instance, this is the court in whose district the spouses had their last common residence, provided that at least one of them still resides in the district of this court.

Therefore, if both parties to the divorce proceedings (the spouses) have agreed on the divorce, this in itself is not yet a guarantee that the marriage will be dissolved. Even in this case, the court does not have to rule that it dissolves the marriage unless it concludes that the marriage can no longer fulfill its purpose and the restoration of marital cohabitation cannot be expected from the spouses.

Despite the above, if the other spouse agrees with the divorce and the grounds for divorce are met as we stated above, it will facilitate and speed up the divorce process. If everything indicates a qualified breakdown of the marriage and, moreover, the parties agree to the divorce, the court will not unnecessarily prolong the proceedings and can dissolve the marriage as early as the first hearing.

Divorce proceedings are regulated by Act No. 161/2015 Coll., the Civil Procedure Code for Non-Adversarial Matters (hereinafter referred to as the “CMP”). According to Section 93 of the CMP: „The proceedings shall be initiated only upon the petition of one of the spouses.“ The Slovak legal system does not anchor the possibility of a so-called divorce by agreement, where the spouses would submit a mutual divorce agreement to the court.

In proceedings where both spouses agree to the divorce and the court does not regulate the rights and obligations toward minor children for the time after the divorce, the courts—according to our experience—usually decide at the first hearing, which lasts only a few minutes.

Divorce proceedings take place in such a way that one of the spouses files a petition for divorce, the court subsequently delivers the petition to the other spouse, and requests them to submit a statement on the petition. Afterward, the court usually schedules a hearing (however, a decision without ordering a hearing is not ruled out either).

To speed up the process, we recommend drafting the petition for divorce so that it meets all the formal requirements of a submission and contains a description of the decisive facts proving that the relations between the spouses are so seriously disrupted and permanently broken that the marriage cannot fulfill its purpose and the restoration of marital cohabitation cannot be expected from the spouses.