Brussels, 15/10/2009 (Agence Europe) - The EU Council of Notaires (CNUE) backs the draft legislation unveiled by the European Commission on Wednesday 14 October 2009 to make it easier to administer cross-border inheritance in the European Union (see EUROPE 9997 and 9998). CNUE chair Bernard Reynis said that the council backed this ambitious project that will provide greater legal certainty to European citizens. To date, he explained, inheritors have often had serious problems asserting their rights and the diversity of national rules has caused great uncertainty. The EU regulation will clarify which rules apply to inheritance and this will help citizens and their families, while respecting the various systems and legal traditions in the EU, he added. The CNUE is happy that the draft legislation includes the principle of 'controlled autonomy' whereby the law applying to inheritance will be that of the place where the deceased habitually resided. European notaries are also happy about the option of allowing people to plan how to deal with their estate by opting instead for the law of the country of their nationality. CNUE's inheritance specialist, Pascal Chassaing, said that European citizens will be able to decide in advance on how their estate is administered and this provided a genuine guarantee and progress in terms of legal security. He said that the true innovation involved in the idea of setting up EU inheritance certificates to prove entitlement to inherit across the EU. He said this was the cornerstone of the draft regulation because it would mean that inheritance could be recognised in any country despite the fact that there are twenty-seven different legal systems in the EU. He said the new certificate would not replace the existing Member States' certificates and therefore would not be a 'mega-certificate'. Every year, there are some 450,000 wills in the EU (of a total of 4.5 million) that involved inheritance in another country, to the tune of more than €120 billion a year. Chassaing said the new measure was particularly important because there were hundreds of different conflicts in legal systems a few years ago and the new mixing of nationalities in the EU would no doubt see this increase to tens or hundreds of thousands. (B.C. trans fl)