How one legal consultation helped a woman find her dream

Publication date: November 18, 2023

Legal advice alone helped an IDP-woman from Luhansk Oblast not only resolve her inheritance issues, but also find a dream among the losses and problems that gives her strength to live. A successful case from the lawyers of the NGO “Agency for Democratic Development of Donbas”.

Valentyna was born in the Luhansk oblast, where she has lived for 55 years. In 2014, when the village found out that her son had joined the Armed Forces, she was forced to leave the occupied territory and move to her relatives in Zaporizhzhia. But Valentyna’s heart has always remained in her native land.

Stress, relocation, adaptation to a new life as an internally displaced person and to a strange city did not have the best effect on the health of the woman. And during the full-scale war, Valentyna received another hard news: her father died during the occupation in the Kherson oblast. The daughter was unable to bury her father or even to visit his grave.

Later, the village where Valentyna’s father lived was liberated by the Ukrainian army. But the time when the woman was supposed to inherit her father’s legacy was missed. She turned to the NGO “Agency for the Democratic Development of Donbas” with this issue, which she did not know if it was possible to solve now. In addition, Valentyna was in a rather depressed psychological state. Numerous life problems that had fallen on her shoulders had exhausted her.

The organization’s lawyer Tetiana Pliasunova advised Valentyna and explained that her situation with accepting the inheritance was quite solvable.

– At the request of an heir who has missed the deadline for acceptance of the inheritance for a valid reason, the court may grant him an additional period of time sufficient for him to file an application for acceptance of the inheritance (Article 1272 of the Civil Code of Ukraine), comments Tetiana Pliasunova.

She helped the woman prepare all the necessary documents for the court. Its decision will allow Valentyna to become the legal heir.

– In addition, the woman has already got more energy and become more optimistic. Now she has a goal: to return to her parents’ house again, says the lawyer.

The material was created with the support of the international charity platform GlobalGiving and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. The publication’s content is solely the responsibility of the Legal Development Network.

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