The Agreement of May 24, 1993 between the Republic of Poland and Ukraine on legal assistance and legal relations in civil and criminal matters, apart from Article 34(1), does not contain conflict of laws rules relevant to property law relations and possession of movable property. Then again, due to the ease of transporting movables between countries, the universality and much lower extent of formalization of the trade in them, difficulties in determining their owner or persons entitled under other property rights, susceptibility to actual dispositions not based on the will of the owner, and on the other hand, far-reaching differences in the way their legal regime is regulated in the substantive law of various countries, many practical problems arise. The solution to these problems requires first that the applicable law is determined. The probability of the occurrence of this type of issues in Polish-Ukrainian relations has recently intensified because of mass migration of people from Ukraine to Poland, which is accompanied by the transfer of movable items across the state border on an unprecedented scale. Given the lack of appropriate regulations in the provisions of the 1993 legal assistance agreement, Polish and Ukrainian courts must apply domestic conflict of laws rules relevant to proprietary matters. Differences between these rules may result in the application of substantive norms belonging to different legal systems, which poses the risk of forum shopping.
The article analyses the methods of determining the law applicable to property law relations and possession of movable property in Polish-Ukrainian relations against the backdrop of Polish and Ukrainian conflict of laws rules, the similarities and differences between them, the problems emerging from the differences in the substantive property law of both countries, and the means of overcoming them. It also includes a proposal to supplement the legal assistance agreement of 1993 with uniform conflict of laws rules for determining the law applicable to proprietary rights in movable property, modeled on selected solutions taken from Polish and Ukrainian national laws.
English
Język Polski