Many Foreigners are looking for a Filipina to get married and spend the rest of their life with. Sometimes they meet a nice woman but they find out that the woman is married already and separated. And here is the problem. There are no divorce laws in the Philippines to set her free and to be able to marry you.

Three countries in the world do not have a law to regulate divorces.

The first one doesn’t need one simply because only single persons live there: Vatican City. You should know that the Vatican is an independent state situated in the middle of Rome with its own government, laws and more. Therefore it is a country.

The second country is the Island state of Malta. Situated in the Mediterranean Sea between Italy and not far of the coast of the African continent. Why they do not have such laws, I do not know. But now they are members of the European Community maybe a divorce law will be coming soon. (added March 2012: a divorce law has been through the Maltese Parliament)
And Third, there is a state of more than 7000 islands with almost 100 million most catholic people who can easily get married, but cannot get divorced if there are problems. If you are rich in the Philippines there are ways to get separated from your spouse, but this is very expensive and time-consuming. They call it ANNULMENT.

According to Wikipedia:
Annulment is a legal procedure for declaring a marriage null and void. Unlike divorce, it is usually retroactive, meaning that an annulled marriage is considered to be invalid from the beginning almost as if it had never taken place (though some jurisdictions provide that the marriage is only void from the date of the annulment). In strict legal terminology, annulment refers only to making a voidable marriage null; if the marriage is void ab initio, then it is automatically null, although a legal declaration of nullity is required to establish this. The process of obtaining such a declaration is similar to the annulment process. Generally speaking, annulment, despite its retrospective nature, still results in any children born being considered legitimate in the United States and many other countries.

If you have money and you can afford to have an expensive lawyer this is a way to have a legal separation from your spouse. Of course if you like to do it in the Philippines.
If a foreigner has been married in the Philippines but living abroad he can have a divorce easily in his home country and if the marriage has been registered in his home country too. In those countries one should ask a lawyer for advise.

I came across a website handling divorce and annulment in the Philippines. So if you are struggling with a case like that just see this website, maybe it can help you. The website is: BC Philippines. On this website you can find a lot of information about the subject.
There is one more website I have found: JLP Law. These are both pages of law firms willing to help you in your struggle, but I would like to advise you to ask for rates first, and ask also a lawyer in your neighborhood. You should realise that you need a ‘specialist-lawyer’ for these cases because of the possible complications.

Consider this also:
I am not saying that you should do it this way. Many woman have more problems than just being married before.
It happens a lot that a couple was married but after some time the man runs away and lives somewhere else, most of the time with another woman. They call themselves separated, but are not able to legally marry again. If you meet such a woman and you want to marry her you will have some problems. Of course you can just live with her and act if you are married, but if the original husband finds out he can make a lot of problems for you. He could even demand for all your money because he will claim that he was only away to find work or something like that and upon return finds his wife committing adultery. In such cases the richer party will have to pay him off to agree in an annulment or he will report you to some ‘friendly’ police officers so you might end up in jail. So be carefull when you do something like this.
I just wanted to write about this subject because it might happen to someone one day or has happened already.