The following are the types of wills recognized by law:
- public will,
- holographic will, and
- nuncupative will.
Wills must be drafted in person. Persons of diminished capacity shall only be entitled to make public wills. Neither the consent of their legal representatives, nor the approval of a guardian shall be required for the wills of such persons to be valid. Blind or illiterate persons or persons who are incapable of reading or signing their names shall not be entitled to draft holographic wills. The wills of two or more persons included in the same document in any form shall be invalid.
Allegation of a will being invalid or inoperative can only be made by a person who himself would inherit or be relieved of a burden if the will is declared invalid or inoperative. Beneficiaries shall be entitled to enforce their claims to have a will declared invalid or inoperative at any time.
A public will can be drafted before a notary public or a court. The provisions regulating the validity of notaries' documents shall be applied to the formal requirements of public wills.
Public wills cannot be validly drafted before a person who is a relative, guardian, or conservator of the testator or the testator's spouse. Any bequest in favour of a person participating in the drafting of a public will or the relative, guardian, conservator, or ward of such person shall be null and void.
A holographic will can be validly made only in a language that the testator understands, reads, and writes. A holographic will may be hand-written by the testator himself or by another person on his behalf (type-writing shall not be considered one's own handwriting, even if typed by the testator himself).
Basic requirements for holographic wills:
a) a holographic will shall be valid if its testamentary competency, place, and date are indicated in the document itself and
b) if the testator
- writes it himself from the beginning to the end and signs it; or
- signs it in the presence of two witnesses, or
- if he/she has previously signed it, declares the signature to be his own before the two witnesses, and if the will is also signed in both cases by the witnesses, indicating their capacity as such; or
- signs and deposits it personally with a notary public either as an open document or a sealed document, specifically marked as a will.
c) A holographic will consisting of several separate pages shall be deemed valid only if each page is numbered in sequence and signed by the testator and, if witnesses are needed for the validity of the will, also signed by both witnesses.
Any bequest in favour of a witness of a holographic will or another participating person or one of their relatives shall be null and void, unless this section of the will is handwritten and signed by the testator himself/herself. A bequest in favour of a witness or one of his relatives shall not be null and void if two witnesses other than the witness himself/herself have participated in drafting the will.
Nuncupative wills can be made by persons who are in an extraordinary life threatening situation and would not be able to make a written will at all or would only be able to make one with considerable difficulty. A nuncupative will shall be valid if a testator orally exhibits his will in its entirety in the presence of two witnesses in a language understood by the witnesses and concurrently announces that his oral statement constitutes his will.
A nuncupative will shall become inoperative if the testator had the opportunity to draft a will in another form without any difficulty during an uninterrupted period of three months following the cessation of the situation that provided the conditions for making the nuncupative will.
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