The Legal Effect Of Clauses Like “Property Belongs To Children” In The Divorce Settlements

In recent years,there have been numerous disputes surrounding the legal effect of clauses like“property belongs to children”in the divorce settlements.It involves complex legal relations and multiple types of lawsuits.Judicial opinions are divided on the legal character of this clause so that injustices such as different sentences in the same kind cases often occur.The paper gathered a large-scale statistics with 774 adjudicative documents from 2010 to 2021 and comprehensively analyzed the logic of this judgment,thus deriving four problems in the adjudication.In order to solve these problems,we need to identify the nature of the clause.Then starting with the theoretical controversy,we analyzed two mainly approaches of interpretation of the clauses:the property law approach containing gift contracts and altruistic contracts mode;the family law approach i.e.the doctrine of wholeness of divorce agreements containing the two modes too.Combining the principles of civil law and the latest provisions of civil law,guiding by the concept of family law,we argue that the nature of the clause is a third party beneficiary clause cling to the divorce property settlement agreement.According to the character,we analyze the effect of clauses on the parents,the children and the debtees.For the divorcing parties,the tripartite legal structure of the altruism clause is used to distinguish the compensation relationship between the divorcing parties in terms of statutory and contractual obligations in the divorce property settlement,thus avoiding the ambiguity of the holistic doctrine.The different types of obligations are used to specifically determine whether divorcing parties can exercise the right of arbitrary revocation.The divorcing parties exercising the right of revocation must base on the provisions of the General Provisions of the Civil Code and the Marriage and Family Provisions.For the children,the clause is applied with reference to the rules of genuine contract for the benefit of third party,and the children are considered as parties to the contract as third party beneficiary.Hence,we analyzed the children’s right of requesting to performance.For debtees,because requesting to performance is a right to petition of obligatory right,and the child has an interest sufficient to preclude enforcement only under special circumstances.In the case of debtees’ cancellation right,the conditions for exercising the right are judged by analogizing the gift under a contractual obligation to a gratuitous transfer and the gift under a statutory obligation to compensated transfer.