Natural death vs civil death

Abstract

Death is an inevitable phenomenon, which implies the termination of the life of persons. All over the world, in a day, a large number of children are born, but unfortunately also a large number of people die because of illness, age, homicide, suicide or poverty. Death is not only a biological process, as at the same time it affects directly the legal capacity of a person. Therefore the natural death of the person is seen as a cause that brings legal consequences at its verification. Being considered as a natural phenomenon as well as legal, death is considered as a legal fact with which legislations bind the beginnings, changes or terminations of legal. Legal capacity of a person, as a condition to undertake rights and obligations, is the determining element to gain the quality of a natural person. This quality is gained with the birth and terminated with the death. There are special cases, under which it is difficult to verify the natural death of a person for reasons such as: absence of the cadaver or the uncertainty of the circumstances in which the person has been lost or absented. In order to guarantee the legal security and also the conservation of personal and property rights of the person, legislations have provided the declaration of the person dead, which may come as a result of natural disasters, accidents, military actions or as a consequence of declaring before the person missing. This paper aims to make a comparative analysis between the procedure of declaration of a natural death of the person and the procedure of declaring a person dead according to the Albanian legislation. For this reason it will be analyzed the persons who are entitled to make the request for the declaration of the person dead, the legal force of the decision of the court through which the person is declared dead and the necessary time limits for declaring a person dead.