Research On Chinese Divorce Damages Compensation System

The changes in citizens’ values have also brought about more cases in China that the malicious behaviors of either spouse result in divorce,and marriage breakdown has greatly hurt the injured party.To help the injured party,a divorce damage compensation system was officially established in 2001,stipulating that in case of marriage breakdown due to the circumstances in Article 46 of the Marriage Law,the tort-feasor has the obligation to satisfy the divorce damage compensation request of the injured party.This is an important countermeasure of China to improve the divorce legal remedy system.The officially validated "Civil Code" in 2021 follows the relevant stipulations of the original "Marriage Law" on divorce damage compensation system,and optimizes the original system according to the current social and economic development situation.Specifically,the bottom clause of "other major faults" is supplemented in the current "Civil Code" on the basis of the four statutory faults in the original "Marriage Law".Even the supplementary clause has expanded the scope of application of the system to a certain extent,the lack of clear provision in the original divorce damage compensation system in specific cases has not been resolved.In addition,there is no standard of determining the specific amount of compensation.To address above issues,the written judgments of second instance of 141 divorce damage compensation cases on China Judgements Online from 2014 to 2020 were analyzed through case analysis method.Then,this paper summarizes the characteristics of the divorce damage compensation system during the period of the original "Marriage Law",and specifically analyzes other fault behaviors recognized in practice.Then,this paper compares the current divorce damage compensation systems in France,Japan,South Korea and other countries through comparative analysis method.Next,this paper concludes successful experience of other countries in determining faulty behaviors and the standard of compensation by analyzing other countries’ experience,in hope of providing reference for the improvement of China’s related systems.In Chapter 4,this paper analyzes the divorce damage compensation system during the period of Civil Code,and proposes the applicable circumstances of the bottom clause based on the research outcomes in the previous chapters,including but not limited to pregnancy or childbirth without cohabitation and sexual crimes in some circumstances.In terms of the criteria for determining the amount of compensation for divorce damages,this article summarizes four factors that needs great attention in judicial trials of related cases according to the current domestic judicial cases and successful experience of other countries with similar systems,namely,Duration of marriage and the devotion of the injured party to the family,fault circumstances,damage consequences and social factors.The official implementation of "Civil Code" marks that China’s rule of law has ushered in a new stage.This paper’s investigation on the scope of the bottom clause and criteria of compensation is conductive to further improving the divorce damage compensation system.In addition,it will be of great practical significance to the legal remedy for the injured party.