War & Wedding

I wanted to write a post with another topic but it’s news these days: destination wedding planners are undergoing the cancellation of some weddings.
There are professional figures who even in Italy specialize in marriages of Russian citizens here, imagine them after two years of very little work now to have to suffer another time this fate.
But I’m here to write about law applied to the wedding and hence the title that appears a real antithesis. Two opposing concepts: love and hate in opposition and it is of force majeure cause that we return to speak.
We were about to file the covid, the biggest force majeure the wedding world had to face, and here’s another.

Once a client of mine, a wedding planner, brought back to me a phrase that had said her husband reading the contract that I had just delivered, specifically had read the detail of force majeure “Hell but here is just the arrival of aliens!” Yes, that is all that is missing today and I do not know whether to start to include it in my contracts.
Returning to us, war is fully among the causes of force majeure, I remind you for convenience the definition “It consists in an event of such a force to which it is objectively not possible to resist. This event, by its intrinsic force, determines the person to perform a positive or negative act in a necessary and inevitable way. As in the case of chance, he points out the cause of exemption from liability.” (Brocardi.it)

But what does that mean? It means applying the principle, for example, to a contract for the provision of a service, that the debtor is exempted from fulfilling the obligation.
Why are Russian citizens annulling marriages in Italy? Simply because given the state of events and the recent inclusion of Italy in the list of countries hostile to Russia precisely, would risk their lives in the true sense of the word and could even be banned airspace so they would be unable to set foot in Italy.

The same goes for the Ukrainian citizens and for the citizens of the states that will be involved (of course we hope that everything will stop soon) but we must remember a few elements.
The annulment of a wedding today for a future date cannot be ascribed 100% to a force majeure cause and this because the event must fall back into it. We are at the 13th day of war but we absolutely do not know what will happen tomorrow. Uncertainty therefore, as has happened in the case of the pandemic, can generate anxiety that in turn is leading future spouses to make hasty decisions.
From a point of view, however, it is the case to highlight how the destion wedding follows very different logic than a local wedding: the need to book some services well in advance accompanied by the work in progress of the organizational part that often, or almost always, play advance door planners and customers to decide to postpone.
The covid has been harassing us for two years and I hope with all my heart that the war will soon give us a definitive truce, which is why I renew my first advice in a pandemic: postpone and never cancel.
Is this happening to you, too, with your foreign spouses?
Contact me and together we will understand how to act and above all we will analyze your contract to verify that you are armored in front of the causes of force majeure.