INTRODUCTION

Respect for private and family life is a fundamental human right recognised from and guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights, of which Albania became a member in 1996. In its narrow meaning the notion of family law, as basically protected by the Convention, means the parents and the children. But in the meaning of the Convention this is not limited only to the parents and children. The jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights has accepted that family life covers all persons who have blood ties or a juridical relationship like marriage.

The right to marry and found a family is provided by Article 12 of the Convention and is closely related to the right for respect to private and family life as provided by Article 8. According to Article 12 of the Convention, ‘Men and women of marriageable age have the right to marry and to found a family, according to the national laws governing the exercise of this right’. The concept of family life, according to the jurisprudence of the ECtHR, involves the idea of providing protection to spouses from each other. In its jurisprudence the court has accepted and defined the respect and dignity between spouses during marriage as the fundamental objective according to Article 8 of the Convention where the court acknowledged the positive obligations of the state for insuring the effective respect to family life between spouses, especially in the circumstances of a couple in crisis.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which Albania is a party, followed on from the International Covenant for Civil and Political Rights, and has stipulated the obligation of free and complete consent of the spouses to get married, during marriage and dissolution of the marriage. This principle is partially guaranteed by Article 14 of the Convention and Article 5 of the Protocol 7, which provides that:

The wording ‘in the event of marriage dissolution’, does not imply the obligation of the state to provide the dissolution of marriage or any of the other forms of dissolving the marriage.