One of the mechanisms for legal regulation of the waiver of jurisdiction by the competent courts of one state in favour of the courts of another state is the forum non conveniens rule, which allows a court to suspend and/or close proceedings on the grounds that the court of another state is more convenient (appropriate) for a fair and objective resolution of the case. This rule is the legal basis for an institution which in the doctrine, legislation and case law of many states is called “transfer of jurisdiction”. The latter, unlike the institution of competition of jurisdictions, is relatively new and has hardly been studied in domestic legal science. The purpose of this article is to analyse existing international treaties in order to identify the peculiarities of the application of this institution and to determine the prospects for its further development. It has been established that existing international treaties regulate several issues of the procedural mechanism for the transfer of jurisdiction. At the same time, a number of procedural issues are subsidiarily regulated by the domestic legislation of each state, due to the lex fori principle inherent in international civil procedure. The exception is the member states of the European Union, in which the procedural order of transfer of jurisdiction is specified by the Brussels IIb Regulation. The key issue for the transfer of jurisdiction in international family disputes concerning children is whether the transfer of jurisdiction is in the best interests of the child, which are determined taking into account the factual circumstances of each case. The following areas for further development of the institution of transfer of jurisdiction have been identified: implementation of the provisions of the 1996 Hague Convention on Parental Responsibility into the domestic legislation of Ukraine; development of the provisions of this convention in the EU Regulation Brussels IIb; extension of the scope of application of this institution to other categories of civil cases with a foreign element, in particular in accordance with the provisions of the 2000 Hague Convention on the International Protection of Adults. Close, direct judicial cooperation, including through the International Hague Network of Judges, is the key to the effective application of the transfer of jurisdiction.

Authored books

1. De Bruin Michelle Smith, Transnational Litigation: Jurisdiction and Procedure (Thomson Round Hall 2008).

2. Cherniak Yu, Unifikatsiia norm mizhnarodnoho tsyvilnoho protsesu z rozghliadu simeinykh sporiv (Alerta 2018) (in Ukrainian).

Journal articles

3. Cherniak Yu, Bilous O, Pravyla mizhnarodnoho tsyvilnoho protsesu (iz komentarem) [2016] 7/8 Yurydychnyi zhurnal 145–146 (in Ukrainian).

4. Cherniak Yu, Bilous O, Pryntsypy mizhnarodnoho tsyvilnoho protsesu (iz komentarem) [2016] 7/8 Yurydychnyi zhurnal 15–32 (in Ukrainian).