Andorra hospital will upheld after long inheritance dispute
Courts found a will signed in a palliative‑care hospital room valid despite claims the testator lacked capacity and formalities were breached.
Key Points
- Will signed at 23:00 in a palliative‑care hospital room, 15 days before death.
- Excluded relative alleged incapacity, missing initials and biased witnesses.
- Batllia and Tribunal de Corts ruled the will valid; decision became final in Sept 2025.
- Constitutional Court refused the appeal; the dispute is closed and the family remains divided.
When the last direct member of an Andorran family died in mid‑June 2020, more than a life and a modest estate were at stake: a long dispute over the inheritance began that has ended up as protracted litigation.
The contested will was signed at 23:00 in a hospital room while the testator was admitted to the palliative care unit and receiving high doses of morphine. The document was formalised just fifteen days before the testator’s death.
A woman from the excluded branch of the family argued that, at the time, her relative lacked the capacity to make such a decision and that certain formal requirements were not observed — for example, initials on every page of the will and the impartiality of the witnesses. Her complaint named the person designated as heir, the notary and two witnesses who had been present.
She also criticised the speed with which the case was closed, saying key evidence was never sought: a handwriting analysis of the signature, testimony from medical staff, and a broader investigation into the circumstances in which the will was executed. She maintained there were sufficient indications to question the validity of a document that altered the expected line of succession.
Both the Batllia and the Tribunal de Corts rejected these claims. The courts found the will had been properly signed, that the testator retained the necessary capacity, and that the persons involved acted lawfully. The case was archived, and that decision became final at the start of September 2025.
The claimant’s last attempt to reopen the matter reached the Constitutional Court. The court refused to admit the appeal for manifest lack of constitutional content, stressing that its role is not to re‑examine factual questions or to act as a third‑instance court but to safeguard fundamental rights.
With that ruling, the legal dispute is closed. The will signed one night in hospital has decided the distribution of the estate and has, the parties say, irreversibly split what remained of the family.
Original Sources
This article was aggregated from the following Catalan-language sources: