Prague - The European Union family faced a serious split on Friday as the bloc's justice ministers divided into opposing camps over the question of whether to bring in EU rules to govern international divorces.

"Ten EU member states are prepared to (adopt common rules), and there are about 10 who are against it ... I think that the situation justifies more scepticism (concerning a possible agreement)," Czech Justice Minister Jiri Pospisil, who chaired the informal meeting in Prague, told journalists.

The remaining seven EU member states, whose support would be crucial to any deal, "have a wait-and-see attitude," he said.

The debate revolves around the question of which law should apply in cases when citizens of two different EU member states who are married to one another want a divorce - a question to which there is, at present, no standardized EU answer.

In 2006, the EU's executive, the European Commission, proposed an EU-wide rule setting out which national divorce law should apply in cases of international divorce, but Sweden vetoed it, arguing that it could bind Swedes to less liberal divorce laws.

"We're open if other member states want to take initiatives, but for Sweden it would be a step backwards, especially for young women ... We feel the right to divorce is a fundamental right," Swedish Justice Minister Beatrice Ask said in Prague.

Following the block, nine EU states - Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Luxembourg, Romania, Slovenia and Spain - wrote to the commission for permission to apply the EU-level law anyway. France joined the group in January.

The process, known as "enhanced cooperation," was created by the EU's Treaty of Amsterdam in 1997, and allows groups of at least eight member states to ask the commission to apply EU-level laws to them if the bloc as a whole has failed to approve the legislation.

"It's not a question of sidestepping the opposition, but of continuing to work on this very sensitive issue," Jerome Deroulez, the representative of France's justice ministry at the meeting, said.

But the enhanced-cooperation system has never yet been used, amidst concerns that it could lead to the creation of a "two-speed Europe" in which the most enthusiastic member states push for ever-closer cooperation, leaving more sceptical members behind.

"The concern of not fragmenting the (European) judicial community leads us to be prudent ... The optimal conditions (for launching enhanced cooperation) have not apparently been met," EU Justice Commissioner Jacques Barrot said.

"At least" half the EU's 27 member states would have to ask for enhanced cooperation for it to become realistic, he said.

Nonetheless, the commission will consider the application and will decide whether or not to approve it "in reasonable time," before the end of the current administration's mandate in November, he said.

It is not yet clear whether, and when, more member states might join the group of 10 countries pushing for closer cooperation, as some states said that they would join the group, but only if it represented more than half the EU's 27 states, Pospisil said.

At the same meeting, ministers agreed to consider a forthcoming commission proposal aimed at defining which national inheritance law should apply in cases in which an EU citizen dies, leaving behind property in more than one member state.

Roughly 450,000 inheritance cases in Europe each year deal with property in more than one country, with the total legacies valued at 123 billion euros (162 billion dollars), EU officials said. (dpa)