Main reasoning of the court - According to Art. 65 of Act no. 218 of 31 May 1995 reforming Italian rules on international private law, pronouncements adopted abroad and concerning, inter alia, family relationship may be recognised civil effects in Italy insofar as they do not breach the principle of public order and grant the exercise of the right to defense. The court of appeal of Cagliari has recognised legal effects of a repudiation pronouncement adopted in Egypt on the following grounds: the spouse had been notified her husband’s intention to divorce.
The procedure of repudiation had not consisted in a mere repetition of the declaration ‘I shall repudiate you’ for three times in a row. It has been stressed that Egyptian court had verified the actual impossibility to carry on the communion of lives, and had safeguarded the wife’s right to defense and, after the pronouncement, her right to alimony. The Italian judges have also remarked that the Egyptian civil law recognises a wife an equal right to unilateral divorce (without her husband’s consent).