It is discriminatory for a child to automatically assign the father’s name before the mother’s name

Posted on 10/26/2021 12:20 PMStudy time: 2 minutes

LThe European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled on Tuesday that it was “discriminatory” and that it would be “extremely difficult” for a parent to disagree with the “maternal” name following the father’s name.

He was arrested by a court for allegedly discriminating against a Spanish woman during her pregnancy. When his child was born in 2005, Spanish law stated that if there was a disagreement between the parents, the child would have the mother’s name following the father’s surname.

Case by case

The judges of the ECHR held that in the event of a parental disagreement, the rule for teaching the child the father’s name would follow the mother’s rule, which “may be necessary in practice and not necessarily contradictory”. With the European Conference on Human Rights.

However, they ruled that “it is impossible to denigrate, is very harsh and discriminatory against women” and that the “difference in treatment” was not fair to the complainant and therefore violated the convention.

European judges justified their decision by the circumstances of the case: the child of the complainant was not immediately recognized by his father, so his mother’s surname was “more than a year old.”, Until the father’s approval. Spain ordered the complainant to pay 10,000 euros for “non-cash damage”.

Meanwhile, the situation in Spain is such that in the event of a disagreement between a law dated 2011 and the parents, the main criterion for deciding the attribute sequence of surnames is “child interests” up to the judge responsible for civil status.