INTRODUCTION

The Czech Republic is party to a number of bilateral treaties on legal assistance that contain provisions on succession law. A number of these bilateral treaties deal not only with legal assistance in civil matters but also with legal assistance in criminal matters. Apart from national law and the law of the European Union, they represent another source of private international law in the Czech Republic. Pursuant to Article 10 of the Czech Constitution, promulgated treaties, to whose ratification the Parliament of the Czech Republic has given its consent and by which the Czech Republic is bound, form a part of the Czech legal order and take precedence over conflicting national rules. The relationship between international treaties and national law is also explicitly stipulated in Section 2 of the Czech Act on Private International Law (hereinafter ‘Czech PILA’). According to this provision, the statute is applied when an international treaty by which the Czech Republic is bound does not provide otherwise. Bilateral treaties thus take priority, provided the respective issue is regulated differently than in national law, irrespective of which rule was adopted earlier. The same scheme applies also to multilateral treaties. From the perspective of the Czech Republic the relevance of multilateral treaties in the field of succession is minimal. The Czech Republic is not bound by the 1961 Hague Convention on the Conflicts of Laws Relating to the Form of Testamentary Dispositions. The only multilateral treaty in the field of succession law to which the Czech Republic is a party is the 1973 Hague Convention Concerning the International Administration of the Estates of Deceased Persons. The material scope of this Convention is not in conflict with the scope of the Succession Regulation. Therefore, this Convention is not considered as relevant within this contribution.

The majority of bilateral treaties on legal assistance were concluded before 1993, the year when the former Czechoslovakia split into two independent States: the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic. Therefore, in the majority of the bilateral treaties the contracting party is either the Czechoslovak Republic, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic or the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic, depending on the date of their signature and respective changes in the political arrangement of the Czechoslovak State.