MINSK, 7 December (BelTA) – Belarusian Justice Minister Oleg Slizhevsky and his Russian counterpart Alexander Konovalov signed a program on cooperation for 2018-2019, BelTA has learned.
When commenting on the previous two-year cooperation program, Oleg Slizhevsky remarked that virtually every task mentioned in the document has been fulfilled. The working groups on law enforcement and interaction between registry offices did some fruitful work. As a result, they approximated several legal norms of enforcement proceedings. “There were some problems with enforcing judgements of one state in the other state because of different requirements to these documents. Amendments were introduced to the federal law on enforcement proceedings, related norms were stipulated in Belarus' law on enforcement proceedings, too. Unlike before, today there are no problems with executing such documents,” Oleg Slizhevsky said.
As for the work of registry offices, there also were certain issues related, in particular, to updating the marital status of Belarusians in Russia, and vice versa. “In order to solve the problems that our citizens had in the other state, the registry offices explored their reasons. The justice ministries worked out specific proposals and brought them forward to the registry offices so that our countries have common practices and requirements. These problems have been minimized, but not completely cleared up,” Oleg Slizhevsky said.
He told BelTA that today there are no specific unsolved problems. Certain technical issues remain in place due to different enforcement practices. They are now under consideration. In particular, a decision has been made to extend the list of enforcement documents to be executed in the other state. For instance, the enforcement of judgments of economic courts in Russia has been facilitated. The same goes for enforcing alimony orders. The work on a new agreement is nearing completion. “We received the Russian version of the agreement literally the other day. We will coordinate it with concerned government bodies in Belarus. I think we will sign such an agreement very soon,” Oleg Slizhevsky remarked. In his words, this will reduce the amount of time required for alimony enforcement, which will definitely have a positive effect on the protection of rights and interests of Belarusians and Russians.
The 14th joint session of the Belarusian and Russian justice ministries took place in Minsk on 7 December. The participants reviewed important law-related matters, among them approaches to the international regulation of the facilitation of enforcement proceedings, the role of justice ministries in the notary system development.
