Margareta Brattström

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Makars pensionsrättigheter

THIS THESIS CONTAINS an analysis of spouses’ pension rights and how such rights are dealt with when a marriage is dissolved. It aims to examine what effect the rules on the treatment of various pension rights have in respect of the interests that have to be given due attention under the property laws applicable to spouses. Under present law, neither rights to a state pension nor, usually, rights to an occupational pension may be shared in the event of divorce. However, savings that have been invested in a private pension scheme may be shared along with the spouses’ other assets. On the death of a spouse, no pension rights are shared, but the surviving spouse may be entitled to a survivor’s pension in connection with the deceased spouse’s pension rights. The thesis sets out the grounds on which current legislation is based and analyses how they accord with the considerations underlying the provisions of property law applicable to spouses. The various forms taken by pension rights are examined in the matter of, inter alia, how pension rights accrue, how the size of the pension is determined, what possibilities are open to the person concerned to implement rights to accrued pension and which survivors’ pensions may derive from pension rights. A trend in the last ten years has brought the various forms of pension much closer to one another today than was ever the case in the past. A wide-ranging debate has been going on in Sweden over the past forty years on how spouses’ pension rights might be equalized. That debate is reproduced here and various proposals for equalization are analysed. A comparative survey of various ways adopted in other European countries for equalizing spouses’ pension rights is used here to evaluate the Swedish system. Considerable space is devoted to the way the division of spouses’ rights is regulated both in Germany and in England/Wales. The thesis concludes with a discussion, against the current legal and political background, of the shape that might be taken by a division of spouses’ pension rights when a marriage ends in divorce.