The Hague: An ageing continent has a quiet legal problem it has been slow to name. Millions of Europeans live with conditions that gradually erode their capacity to manage their own affairs, from dementia to the aftermath of a stroke, and a growing number of them own property, hold savings or receive care in a country other than the one they call home. When their ability to decide fails, the question of which national court should appoint a guardian, authorise a sale or approve medical treatment has been answered by a tangle of incompatible rules that often leaves the most defenceless people stranded between jurisdictions.
The provisional agreement that the Council and Parliament struck on 12 May is an attempt to untangle it. The new regulation sets out which member state’s courts hold jurisdiction in cross-border cases involving adults who can no longer make decisions without support, and it lays down how protective measures ordered in one country must be recognised in another. It builds on the 2000 Hague Convention, the international instrument that ties jurisdiction to a person’s habitual residence, nationality or the location of their assets, but it goes further than that treaty in one striking respect.
That innovation is choice. For the first time the adult concerned will be able to nominate the court that should handle their affairs, provided there is a genuine connection between the person and the forum they pick. It is a deceptively radical idea in a field built on the assumption that incapacity strips away agency. By letting someone designate, while still able, where their future protection should be decided, the regulation treats the wishes of a person facing decline as something to be honoured rather than overridden, a principle disability advocates have pressed for years.
The practical stakes are concrete and often urgent. Consider a retiree who moves south for the climate, buys a flat, and years later develops Alzheimer’s while their children remain in the north. Under the old patchwork, selling that flat to fund care could require duplicated proceedings, conflicting guardianship orders and months of legal limbo. The regulation promises near-automatic recognition of protection measures across borders, with only narrow exceptions, so that a guardianship granted in one capital does not have to be litigated afresh the moment it meets another country’s bureaucracy.
The reform is not without its critics, and their unease is instructive. Some lawyers worry that allowing an adult to choose a court invites a subtle form of forum shopping, where families steer a vulnerable relative toward the jurisdiction whose rules suit them rather than the person. The drafters answer that the requirement of a real connection, and the safeguards around capacity at the moment of choice, are meant to blunt that risk. Whether they do will depend on how national courts police the boundary between genuine preference and quiet manipulation.
There is a demographic logic driving the whole exercise that no government can ignore. The continent is growing older, its citizens are more mobile than any previous generation, and the share of people who will at some point need someone else to act for them is rising steadily. A legal order built for a settled population is poorly suited to one that retires abroad, holds assets in several states and crosses borders for treatment. The regulation is an admission that free movement, the bloc’s proudest achievement, must also work for those least able to assert it.
The timeline is unhurried, as these things tend to be. Once the text is formally confirmed it enters into force twenty days after publication, but the substantive rules apply only after a transition of roughly two years, giving member states time to wire the new jurisdiction and recognition machinery into national courts. For the families navigating the current maze, that wait will feel long. For a Union that has spent decades perfecting the free movement of the healthy and the able, it is a belated acknowledgement that dignity should not dissolve at a frontier.
