Text of the provision
Art. 55. A petition for legal separation may be filed on any of the following grounds:
(1) Repeated physical violence or grossly abusive conduct directed against the petitioner, a common child, or a child of the petitioner;
(2) Physical violence or moral pressure to compel the petitioner to change religious or political affiliation;
(3) Attempt of respondent to corrupt or induce the petitioner, a common child, or a child of the petitioner, to engage in prostitution, or connivance in such corruption or inducement;
(4) Final judgment sentencing the respondent to imprisonment of more than six years, even if pardoned;
(5) Drug addiction or habitual alcoholism of the respondent;
(6) Lesbianism or homosexuality of the respondent;
(7) Contracting by the respondent of a subsequent bigamous marriage, whether in the Philippines or abroad;
(8) Sexual infidelity or perversion;
(9) Attempt by the respondent against the life of the petitioner; or
(10) Abandonment of petitioner by respondent without justifiable cause for more than one year.
For purposes of this Article, the term "child" shall include a child by nature or by adoption.
(9a)
Family Code of the Philippines, Executive Order No. 209, approved July 6, 1987. The Code took effect on August 3, 1988 (Republic v. Orbecido III, G.R. No. 154380, October 5, 2005). Reproduced in full.
What this article means
Legal separation is a different remedy from annulment or declaration of nullity, and the difference is fundamental: a decree of legal separation does not end the marriage. The spouses may live apart and their property is separated, but the marriage bond remains, and neither party is free to remarry. This is sometimes called "relative divorce" or separation from bed and board.
Because the marriage survives, the grounds here are about conduct during the marriage — violence, infidelity, abandonment, and the like — rather than a defect existing at the time it was celebrated, which is the concern of Article 45 annulment and Article 35 and Article 36 nullity.
Reading the grounds
Two features are worth noting. Ground (1) requires that abusive conduct be repeated or grossly abusive — a single lapse is generally not enough. Ground (4) turns on a final judgment of imprisonment of more than six years, and applies even if the respondent is later pardoned. Ground (10) requires abandonment without justifiable cause for more than one year.
These grounds do not run on their own. A petition can be defeated by the defenses in Article 56 — condonation, consent, connivance, mutual guilt, collusion, or prescription — and it cannot be tried at all until the six-month cooling-off period in Article 58 has passed.
Related provisions
- Article 56 — the grounds on which a legal-separation petition will be denied (condonation, consent, connivance, collusion, mutual guilt, prescription).
- Article 58 — the six-month cooling-off period before trial.
- Article 63 — the effects of a decree of legal separation.
Cases interpreting this article
- Authorities on the individual grounds and on the Article 56 defenses will be added as each is verified against primary sources.