cr-nammu.ai — grounding & sourcing

What grounds our Costa Rican family-law AI

Family law here runs on four live bodies of law: CPF for procedure, CF for substance, LVD for protective orders, and CNA for children's rights. This page shows exactly which articles ground each process, the corrections a SINALEVI line-read forced, and how sensitive material is handled.

Procedure Ley 9747 (CPF) — in force since 01 Oct 2024Substance Ley 5476 (CF) — 1974SINALEVI_VERIFIED — not yet ATTORNEY_VERIFIED

Quick background

Costa Rican family law runs on two codes written fifty years apart. The Código Procesal de Familia (CPF, Ley N.º 9747) is brand new — in force only since October 1, 2024 — and replaced a fragmented procedure scattered across general civil rules and piecemeal reform. It is purely procedural: how a case starts, which of five process types it falls into, how hearings run, how judgments get enforced. It does not say what a divorce requires substantively, what counts as a valid unión de hecho, or what parental duties consist of — that layer still lives in the Código de Familia (CF, Ley N.º 5476), in force since 1974 and only ever partially amended.

Two more live bodies of law sit alongside that pair: the Ley contra la Violencia Doméstica (LVD, Ley N.º 7586, 1996) governing protective orders, and the Código de la Niñez y la Adolescencia (CNA, Ley N.º 7739, 1998), which cuts across nearly every other process the moment a minor is involved. Family law has a wrinkle the civil branch doesn't: CF and CPF share overlapping low article numbers that mean completely unrelated things — both codes have an "Article 5," and they aren't the same provision. That's covered in its own section below, because it drove a real design decision in how our system tags source text.

This page describes source grounding, not legal advice. It tells you what our system reads and how thoroughly that reading has been checked — including corrections our own earlier mapping needed. It does not tell you how the law applies to your facts.

Before you read further

Nothing on this page is guidance for an active domestic-violence or custody situation. If you're dealing with either right now, the right next step is a licensed Costa Rican attorney or the relevant court — a Juzgado de Familia, or for protective orders, the Juzgado Contra la Violencia Doméstica — not a grounding explainer on a product website.

Source alignments, by process

Six process types are currently modeled. For each, every governing law is named next to its article numbers — in this branch, a bare article number is not a complete citation. Correction callouts are surfaced deliberately: evidence the mapping was checked against SINALEVI, not asserted.

Divorcio

Procedural arc CPF · substantive grounds & property CF

SINALEVI_VERIFIED

Stage	Articles	Source	Covers
Conciliación previa	9	CPF	Mandatory pre-hearing conciliation; barred where there's an unequal power dynamic between the parties
Vía notarial / mutuo consentimiento	289–293	CPF	Notarial divorce by mutual consent, no minors or disputed assets; art. 290 = minors carve-out; art. 293 = opposition to convenio
Trámite resolutivo contencioso	222–245, 48, 48 bis, 49	CPF + CF	Contested track — demanda, 8-day contestación, audiencia inicial; CF supplies substantive causales
Liquidación de bienes gananciales	41–47	CF	Division of marital community property — 50% of net value per spouse
Sentencia (divorcio / separación / nulidad)	89, 96, 105–109	CPF	Art. 89 = cosa juzgada material; art. 96 = enforcement despite pending appeal

Correction flagged in the source spec

The notarial divorce block (CPF arts. 289–293) was an unconfirmed placeholder in an earlier pass. SINALEVI confirms the full sequence — petition, minor-children carve-out, opposition to the convenio — sits exactly there. Now a confirmed anchor, not a guess.

Violencia Doméstica — Medidas de Protección

Substantive & procedural core LVD · general procedure CPF

Confidentiality: reforzada

Stage	Art.	Source	Covers
Solicitud de medidas de protección	7	LVD	Broad standing to request; low initial evidentiary threshold
Resolución de otorgamiento / rechazo	3	LVD	The catalog of protective measures a court can order
Señalamiento y audiencia	9	CPF	Conciliation is prohibited in a domestic-violence context — a deliberate carve-out from the general CPF rule
Duración y prórroga	4	LVD	1–6 months, extendable; Ley 8925's 2011 reform extends practical duration up to a year while unlifted — high-severity deadline alert
Levantamiento anticipado	5	LVD	Early lifting, only at the protected person's request
Sentencia de fondo / recursos	96, 100–104	CPF	Appeal does not suspend the measure (art. 96); LVD-specific appeal deadline not yet independently confirmed — see open items
Competencia	17	CPF	Jurisdiction sits with the court of the protected person's residence
Archivo del proceso	unconfirmed	CPF	Closing stage once a measure expires without renewal — not yet located in the consolidated text

Of the six processes here, this one carries the most schema stages and the most explicit procedural guardrails, including the conciliation prohibition above — unique to this track. Case files carry a -VD expediente suffix and are handled by a dedicated Juzgado Contra la Violencia Doméstica.

Pensión Alimentaria

CPF Título V, Capítulo 1 — arts. 257–288

Largest correction in this branch

An earlier draft placed the pension procedure around CPF arts. 19, 56, and 87. None of that is right. Art. 19 is competencia territorial — jurisdiction, not procedure. Art. 56 doesn't correspond to a pension provision in the CPF at all (in the CF, art. 56 is the unrelated guarda, crianza y educación). Art. 87 is a rule about personal service of notifications, unrelated to support. The actual block is CPF arts. 257–288 — all of Título V, Capítulo 1.

Section	Art.	Covers
Disposiciones generales	257–266	Scope; burden of proof (259); migratory restriction (261); not cosa juzgada material — modifiable later (262)
Procedimiento principal	267–275	Demanda; conciliation within 10 business days (269); sentencia anticipada within 24h if conciliation fails (270); opposition within 5 days, doesn't suspend effects (271); opposition hearing (273)
Modificación / extinción	277–279	Separate legajo; single hearing; automatic cost-of-living adjustment
Ejecución de la deuda alimentaria	280–288	Due day 3 (280); wage garnishment priority (282); apremio corporal (283–284); collection of arrears (285); extraordinary expenses (288)

Correction — apremio corporal is not art. 101

An earlier draft treated CPF art. 101 as the apremio anchor. It isn't — art. 101 just lists which resolutions are appealable. The real provisions: art. 283 — graduated confinement, 2 months first order / 4 months second / 6 months third and after, capped by an age ceiling under 65; art. 284 — nighttime confinement, 20:00–05:00, 6-month cap.

A correction that removes a citation rather than adding one

CPF art. 286 was an unconfirmed placeholder for a transitional "Fondo de Pensiones Alimentarias" (15% interest on arrears). Verification confirms it was fully repealed by Ley 10558 (23 Oct 2024 — three weeks after the CPF itself took effect). Tagged derogated: true; never cited as in force. Same treatment for the entire prior statute, Ley 7654 — wholly derogated by the CPF, retained only to resolve pre-2024 case-law citations, hard-excluded from live queries.

Custodia y Responsabilidad Parental

CPF + CNA

SINALEVI_VERIFIED

Stage	Art.	Source	Covers
Solicitud de custodia / interrelación	222 incs. 6–7, 18	CPF	Unilateral petition vs. contested resolutivo, depending on dispute
Medidas cautelares urgentes	17	CPF	Emergency protective measures, imminent risk to a minor
Audiencia — interés superior del menor	5, 364	CNA + CPF	CNA art. 5 — HIGH-confidence, cross-cutting; CPF 364 — representation of children under 12
Ejecución de acuerdo o resolución	20, 316–319	CPF	Tutela de la realidad (316); coercive enforcement (318); PANI supervision (319)
Suspensión / pérdida / restitución parental	222 inc. 8, 140+	CPF + CF	See correction below

Correction flagged in the source spec

CPF art. 89 was assumed to govern suspensión de la responsabilidad parental. It doesn't — art. 89 is the general cosa juzgada material provision shared with divorcio and unión de hecho. Custody and parental-responsibility suspension live at art. 222, incisos 6–8: 6 = cuidado, 7 = régimen de interrelación, 8 = suspensión/pérdida. A same-article misattribution across two unrelated CPF provisions, not a cross-code collision — but the same lesson: an unchecked article number is not a safe citation.

Unión de Hecho

Substantive requirements CF · procedural track CPF (shared with divorcio)

SINALEVI_VERIFIED

Stage	Art.	Source	Covers
Solicitud de reconocimiento	242–244, 222 incs. 2–3, 14	CF + CPF	Judicial recognition of a unión de hecho
Cese consensuado	289–293	CPF	Same notarial track used for divorcio
Liquidación de ganancialidad	41, 320–322	CF + CPF	Division of community property, enforced through ejecución

Correction flagged in the source spec

The three-year cohabitation requirement has been settled doctrine for years, but the article number backing it was unconfirmed. SINALEVI confirms it directly: CF art. 242 requires the union be pública, notoria, única y estable por más de tres años. The substance was never in doubt — what changed is that it's now tied to a verified, citable article.

Ejecución de Resoluciones de Familia

CPF Título VI — arts. 313–328+ · cross-cutting to all five other pipelines

Previously unmapped chapter

This entire chapter was previously unmapped. The earlier draft's coverage was truncated at art. 109 and the rest simply flagged SINALEVI-PENDING — ejecución for family matters had no confirmed statutory home. SINALEVI closes that gap: Título VI, arts. 313–328 and following, organized by the type of obligation being enforced.

Capítulo	Art.	Covers
I — Inscribibles	313–315	Registro Civil action — civil-status and property registrations, transfer-tax exemption
II — Personalísimos	316–319	Custody/visitation enforcement — tutela de la realidad (316), provisional (317), coercive (318), PANI supervision (319)
III — Patrimoniales	320–328+	Community-property division (320–322), obligations to do/not do (323–325), payment of undetermined sums (326–328)

Two cross-links: enforcement proceeds despite a pending appeal under art. 96 (same rule as divorcio and VD, narrow exceptions for irreparable harm); pension apremio corporal links back to arts. 283–284 and appealability at art. 101, inciso p.

The low-article-number collision problem

This is worth its own section: it's the single most concrete reason our metadata schema requires an explicit source-code tag on every chunk, rather than trusting the article number alone. Family law is grounded in four separately-numbered laws — normal on its own — but an unusual amount of unrelated substance piles up under the same low numbers here specifically, because family law inherited decades of overlapping reform rather than one clean recodification.

CNA 5≠CPF 5≠CF 5Three codes, one number, three unrelated provisions. CNA art. 5 is interés superior del menor — HIGH-confidence, cross-cutting to every pipeline touching a minor. CPF art. 5 sits in the procedural code's preliminary object-and-principles section. CF art. 5 is an unrelated substantive family-code provision.

The same risk shows up within a single code, not just across codes — the pensión, custodia, and apremio corrections above (CPF 56, 87, 89, 101) are each cases where an earlier mapping assumed a low article number carried one meaning when the text covered something else entirely. The fix is structural, not just "read more carefully": our chunk schema makes cf_source, lvd_source, and cna_source required fields, not optional metadata, whenever a chunk comes from the CF or CPF. A result that says "art. 5" without naming which code it came from is treated as an incomplete citation, not a citation.

How sensitive material is handled

This branch covers domestic violence and matters directly involving minors, and that shapes how the underlying material is processed — not as a marketing claim, but as specific technical controls documented in the ingestion spec.

Heightened confidentiality taggingspec §12.2 — confidentiality field
Every chunk carries a confidentiality field. Domestic-violence and minor-related content is set to "reforzada" rather than the default "normal" — a distinct, elevated handling tier.
Redaction of identifying detailspec §10.6
Victim and minor names, IDs, addresses, schools, and routines are redacted and never embedded into vectors served to end users.
Jurisprudence anonymized by defaultspec §10.6
Every case-law chunk carries anonymized: true as a baseline, not an opt-in. Full, unredacted -VD expediente numbers are never stored in the served corpus.
Derogated law hard-excluded from default retrievalspec §16.1
Ley 7654 and any confirmed-repealed provision (like CPF art. 286) are tagged derogated: true and excluded from production retrieval unless a query explicitly asks for historical, pre-2024 material.
Case files are never treated as normativaspec §16.1
Redaction rules for actual client workspace data are handled entirely separately from this legal-source ingestion pipeline — case-workspace blobs are never ingested as if they were statutory text.

None of this is a claim that the underlying legal questions are simple, or that this handling eliminates risk — it's a description of specific, named safeguards built into the pipeline.

How to verify this yourself

We'd rather an expert reader check our work than take it on faith. Everything above traces to the Sistema Nacional de Legislación Vigente (SINALEVI), published through Costa Rica's Procuraduría General de la República at pgrweb.go.cr/scij.

Law	Short name	SCIJ nValor2
Ley 9747	CPF Código Procesal de Familia	90569
Ley 5476	CF Código de Familia	970
Ley 7586	LVD Ley contra la Violencia Doméstica	27926
Ley 7739	CNA Código de la Niñez y la Adolescencia	43077

The CPF's consolidated text runs 355 articles, currently version "4 de 4 del 23/10/2024" — already reflecting the Ley 10558 reform enacted three weeks after the code took effect (the reform that repealed art. 286).

What "verified" means here

This branch uses the same five-tier vocabulary as our civil-law grounding page: HIGH | MEDIUM | LOW | SINALEVI_VERIFIED | ATTORNEY_VERIFIED. If you've read our contencioso-administrativo sources page, note that branch uses a different, four-tier vocabulary without LOW or SINALEVI_VERIFIED — tiers don't carry across branches; each is defined independently in its own schema.

HIGH

Independently confirmed — e.g. the apremio corporal terms at CPF 283–284, the pension oposición deadline at art. 271.

MEDIUM

Provisional, cross-referenced against related articles but not yet pinned to a single confirmed source.

LOW

Early-stage or single-source mapping, not yet cross-checked.

SINALEVI_VERIFIED

Checked article-by-article against the consolidated text — the level of the corrections documented on this page.

ATTORNEY_VERIFIED

Reviewed and signed off by a licensed Costa Rican family-law attorney for user-facing citation.

Open items — not yet fully resolved

The LVD-specific appeal deadline for domestic-violence proceedings has no confirmed article number yet. Cross-referenced against the general CPF appeal rules at arts. 100–104; currently tagged MEDIUM.
The archivo del proceso stage — how a protection-measure case formally closes once a measure expires without renewal — is not yet located in the consolidated text and remains SINALEVI-PENDING.

The corrections and article maps on this page have reached SINALEVI_VERIFIED. They have not yet reached ATTORNEY_VERIFIED — a deliberate, separate gate before any of this is presented as a citable legal conclusion for your specific matter, and one that applies here with particular weight given how much of this branch touches domestic violence and child welfare. If you're a practicing abogado de familia and something above doesn't match your own reading of the consolidated text, we want to hear about it.

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