Text of the provision
Art. 59. No legal separation may be decreed unless the Court has taken steps toward the reconciliation of the spouses and is fully satisfied, despite such efforts, that reconciliation is highly improbable.
(n)
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. The notation (n) indicates a new provision with no direct Civil Code antecedent.
What this article means
Article 59 makes reconciliation the court's business, not just the spouses'. No decree of legal separation may issue unless the court has itself taken steps toward reconciliation and is fully satisfied, despite those efforts, that reconciliation is highly improbable. A judge cannot simply find a ground proved and grant the decree; the reconciliation inquiry is a condition of the judgment.
The standard is deliberately high — "highly improbable," not merely unlikely. The provision is one of several in the Title (with the Article 58 cooling-off period and the Article 60 bar on decrees by stipulation) that together make legal separation difficult to obtain by consent and easy to abandon by reconciling.
Related provisions
- Article 58 — the six-month period in which reconciliation efforts occur.
- Article 60 — no decree on a stipulation of facts or confession of judgment.
Cases interpreting this article
- Authorities on the "highly improbable" reconciliation standard will be added here as each is verified against primary sources.