Stupnytskyi K. Civil legal relationships in sphere of storage of disputed property (sequestration) in Ukraine.

The Dissertation is devoted to examining theoretical and practical aspects of how civil relations in Ukraine emerge, change and are terminated in connection to disputed property’s deposition into custody (sequestration), peculiar structure of these relations and the elements that make up their content. The author researched the evolution of disputed property’s preservation and its regulation by law from Ancient Roman times and up to now. The work is focused primarily on how these social relations have been regulated on the territory of nowadays Ukraine. It is determined that storage of disputed things (lat. sequestratio) was known in Roman law as one of juridical means that guaranteed interests of conflicting parties by ensuring safety of appropriate thing. According to traditional sequestration construct two or more persons – conflicting parties concluded appropriate contract and passed thing to intermediator-keeper who undertook to return it to a winner. The author notes that despite of long-term evolution of sequestration relationship modern practice of right-realization and law-enforcement meets different problems. And the reason for that is weakness of current provisions of civil legislation of Ukraine. The article 976 of Civil Code of Ukraine particularly provides that two or more persons disputing the right in an object may transfer such object to a third person that undertakes an obligation after a dispute resolution to return an object to the person recognized the owner by the court decision or by consent of the parties to dispute. An object under dispute may be transferred for storage upon the court decision. At the same time this legislative provision doesn’t allow to give the answers on several important questions. Particularly to whom disputed thing should be returned if conflicting parties refuse the resolution of the dispute in court? What shall they do if one or several persons disputing the right in an object refuse to use sequestration? What if there is no owner among the bailors and this fact is determined during conflict resolution? Who should pay for storage after a dispute resolution? These and other questions demonstrate the relevance of sequestration research. It is substantiated that sequestration as a legal means to ensure legal rights realization and usage can secure not only a subjective right, but also a material interest which means that a party to the dispute is seeking to obtain the material rights for disputed property, e.g. sequestration is used when a right for private property is disputed. It is determined that in the context of distinguishing between security measures for property relations and obligations and also between such measures of legal and factual kind, sequestration must be viewed as a measure of property relations for it limits the property rights and/or a person’s actual possession of disputed property and is realized through actual limitations that are set to keep the parties to the dispute from direct domination over the things that comprise the object of the dispute and thus the object of sequestration. This work aims to categorize the foundations on which the legal relations emerge to secure the disputed property. The research determined that since the agreement to preserve the disputed property may also be perceived as a general storage agreement, we can view it either as a consensual or as a real contract. But, considering it is only used in legal disputes, it is more appropriate to regard the sequestration contract as real, to fulfill its purpose as one of security measures. It’s essential that in this contract must participate the party that actually presides over the disputed property at the moment when a storage agreement is made. Having studied the theoretical foundations and legally set provisions of the current civil legislature of Ukraine that determine the influence of a court’s decision on the legal relation of taking the disputed property for deposit the author states that the court’s decision to grant the sequestration measures in order to secure the claim for legal protection must be considered as a right-establishing legal act in the material civil relations for with it there emerges a non-contractual material civil relation of disputed property deposit that through the method of legal analogy can be guided by provisions that regulate the general storage agreement in the Civil law of Ukraine, except those that contradict the non-contractual nature of the civil relation.