Right to Respect for Family Life

A Child-Centred Court of Human Rights? Strand Lobben v. Norway (30. Nov. 2017)

Guest Blogger Right to Respect for Family Life, Strand and Lobben v. Norway

By Amy McEwan-Strand and Prof. Marit Skivenes, Centre for Research on Discretion and Paternalism (University of Bergen)

In a case of adoption without parental consent – Strand and Lobben v. Norway – the Fifth Section of the European Court of Human Rights (the Court) did not find a violation of Article 8 of either the mother or the child. The outcome of this case may well be surprising to many, since the last few years have seen a massive uproar and negative media attention on child protection interventions internationally, with Norway having a prominent place in this spotlight. In 2015, the Norwegian child protection system received harsh criticism from the Czech president, and the Norwegian embassy in Lithuania even felt it necessary to engage public relation consultants to handle the pressure. The Norwegian word for child protection, “barnevern” is now a term associated with draconian interventions into the family sphere in certain European circuits. Continue reading →

‘Of course a stranger must conform’: reading the Ndidi judgment with Euripides’ Medea

Guest Blogger Migration, Ndidi v. the United Kingdom, Right to Respect for Family Life

By Benoit Dhondt, Belgian lawyer specialized in migration and refugee law. As a teaching assistant, he is also connected to the Human Rights Centre of Ghent University, more specifically its Human Rights and Migration Law Clinic.

Recently the ECtHR took an umpteenth swing at the question to what extent the family life and private life of a settled migrant with a criminal record is worthy of protection. At a time in which Council of Europe Member States, such as Belgium, have developed new legislation concerning the deportation of migrants allegedly posing a threat to public order, the case of Ndidi v. the United Kingdom does little to clarify the Court’s rather heterogenous case law in this matter.  I will give a brief description of the case, after which I will propose a new approach to private life and family life in deportation cases, based on a reading of Euripides’ famous play Medea, and inspired by the dissenting opinion of Judge Turković to the case. Continue reading →

Publication of a picture of a 3-year-old, representing him as an orphan, violates article 8 ECHR

Guest Blogger Bogomolova v. Russia, Right to Private Life, Right to refuse the publication of one’s image, Right to Respect for Family Life

By Ingrida Milkaite, Ghent University

The case of Bogomolova v. Russia concerns the use of an unauthorised photograph of a minor’s face on the front page of a booklet promoting adoption and help for orphans. It proves that the publication of pictures of children without parental consent may have a significant social impact on the family and may violate article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR), protecting the right to private and family life. Continue reading →

K.B. and Others v. Croatia: the Court’s first steps to tackle parental alienation

Guest Blogger Right to Respect for Family Life

By Evelyn Merckx, teaching assistant and PhD researcher at Ghent University

Children’s position during their parents’ separation remains a delicate matter. A variety of reasons can result in a child refusing contact with a parent in response to the challenging situation. Objective reasons can lead to the child’s decision, such as a parent’s aggressive or indifferent behaviour. However, it can also be the result of a smear campaign of the other parent. In the past, the European Court of Human Rights avoided to impose harsh obligations on the State Party to prevent a child alienating a parent. To prevent having to answer the question whether contact is in the best interests of the child in a given case, the Court mainly focuses on the State Parties’ procedural and positive obligations to adopt certain measures to regulate the relations between private individuals through the establishment of an effective regulatory framework of adjudicatory and enforcement machinery (amongst others: ECtHR, Stasik v. Poland, 2015, § 80). Steady case law examines whether the State Party adopted all necessary, relevant and sufficient measures that can be reasonably expected to facilitate contact between parent and child (amongst others: ECtHR, Bostina v. Romania, 2016, § 57) . Furthermore, the Court solely examines the parent’s right to contact with his or her child and hereby refusing to examine the child’s right not to be manipulated. K.B. and others v. Croatia seems to deviate from past case law, providing for a welcome change but entailing some risks as well. Continue reading →

Paradiso and Campanelli v. Italy: Lost in Recognition. Filiation of an Adopted Embryo born by Surrogate Woman in a Foreign Country

Guest Blogger Reproductive health, Right to Private Life, Right to Respect for Family Life

By Elena Ignovska, Assistant professor, University Ss. Cyril and Methodius, Faculty of Law, Skopje, Macedonia.

Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) undoubtedly triggered an earthquake in the concept of parenthood, resulting in a fragmentation of the possible parents: genetic/biological, gestational, factual and legal. Their initial objective was to enable infertile couples to parent genetically related progeny. Yet, they have recently been used in ways that are detached from that initial purpose, which may be problematic from the viewpoint of national family law. A typical example of that is the case of Paradiso and Campanelli v. Italy which demonstrated the opposite intention: using foreign assistance in reproduction for purposes of parenting a non-gestational and genetically unrelated child. The issue before the Court concerned a removal of the child from his intended parents as a result of a (non)recognition of a foreign birth certificate. Continue reading →

The Unbreakable Vow: Marital Captivity in Strasbourg

Corina Heri Babiarz v. Poland, Right to Marriage, Right to Respect for Family Life

By Corina Heri, Visiting Scholar at Ghent University           

It has been the ECtHR’s constant case-law that Article 12 ECHR, while enshrining the right to marry an opposite-sex spouse, does not protect a right to divorce. The fact that the Court has resolutely held on to that idea despite the modern-day legalization of divorce in the Council of Europe Member States has been brought to the fore once again with the Fourth Section’s judgment in Babiarz v. Poland, issued on 10 January 2017. That case, brought under Articles 8 and 12 ECHR, concerned the applicant’s inability to obtain a divorce from his wife without her consent, as a result of which he could not marry the mother of his child. In short, Polish law gave higher priority to the legal fiction of an ongoing relationship between the spouses than to the de facto relationship between the applicant and his new partner, which had been ongoing for 11 years at the time of the Court’s judgment. The majority, in its judgment, found no violation of the ECHR. The present post will summarize the salient arguments made by the two dissenters, Judge Sajó and Judge Pinto de Albuquerque, and add some critiques of its own.

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Biao v. Denmark: Grand Chamber ruling on ethnic discrimination might leave couples seeking family reunification worse off

Guest Blogger Biao v. Denmark, Migration, Prohibition of Discrimination, Right to Respect for Family Life

This guest post was written by Alix Schlüter, Ph.D. researcher at Bucerius Law School, Hamburg.

On May 24th 2016 the Grand Chamber found that the refusal to grant family reunion to a Ghanaian couple in Denmark violated Article 14 ECHR in conjunction with Article 8 ECHR. Overruling the Chamber’s judgment of 2014, the Court held by a majority of twelve votes to five that Danish Laws on Family Reunification in part constituted indirect discrimination on the basis of ethnic origin. In the past, the Court for the most part has confined itself to finding violations of the prohibition of discrimination on grounds of race or ethnic origin merely in certain tightly circumscribed case groups, namely cases concerning school segregation of Roma children and racist violence cases. Against that background, the ruling in Biao must be seen as a big step – all the more as critics have proclaimed that the Court might not yet have developed a satisfactory approach to cases of indirect discrimination.[1] The implementation of the judgment by the Danish government, however, has to be awaited with some uneasy suspense. It might result in leaving Danish nationals of non-Danish ethnic origin seeking family reunification worse off.

Continue reading →