| pplicant name | Moldovan |
| Applicant type | natural person |
| Number of applicants | 1 |
| Country | Ukraine |
| Application no. | 62020/14 |
| Date | 14/03/2024 |
| Judges | Georges Ravarani, President, Lado Chanturia, Carlo Ranzoni, María Elósegui, Mattias Guyomar, Kateřina Šimáčková, Mykola Gnatovskyy |
| Institution | Court |
| Type | Judgment |
| Outcome Art. 8 | Violation |
| Reason | Positive obligation |
| Type of privacy | Economic privacy; Relational privacy |
| Keywords | Paternity proceedings; ratione materiae |
| Facts of the case | The case concerns the rejection of the applicant’s civil action for judicial recognition that a late person was his father. The applicant claims that, without justification, the courts refused to have regard to the DNA evidence and insisted on applying outdated legislation requiring proof of cohabitation and other “social” circumstances. |
| Analysis | The Court has held that the right of a child born out of wedlock to determine the legal relationship between him or her and his or her natural father falls within the scope of the concept of “private life”. On the issue of whether the existence of an underlying material interest, including inheritance rights, excludes the application of the concept of “private life”, the Court notes that in that case the domestic courts were faced not with an issue of “family life” within the meaning of Article 8 or an issue of “private life” seen in terms of personal identity, but with a question of evidence going to the question of whether legal family ties between the applicant and the deceased should be recognised for inheritance purposes. In the circumstances of that case the Court concluded that it would be stretching the notion of family life too far to hold that its subject matter fell within the scope of that notion (see Haas, cited above, § 43). On the other hand, in the later case of Kalacheva v. Russia (no. 3451/05, 7 May 2009), in which the applicant sought to establish the paternity of her child in order to be able to claim child maintenance, the Court accepted that the recognition of paternity could have a number of implications for an interested person, including financial ones. Accordingly, Article 8 of the Convention applies and the Court has jurisdiction ratione materiae. In the present case the domestic courts dismissed the applicant’s application essentially because he had failed to prove that his mother and late putative father had ever cohabited or that Ch. had ever recognised his paternity in any way. These circumstances were required by the 1969 Family Code. The Court observes that the 1969 Family Code was adopted at a time when DNA testing was not yet widespread. Furthermore, it is unclear when or how the argument regarding the reliability of the samples submitted for DNA testing came about, especially in the absence of any copies of the defendants’ submissions to the courts and of the records of the court hearings. While it is not the Court’s function to interpret domestic law or to express a view on the appropriateness of the legal regulation chosen by the legislature of a respondent State in a given field, in the present circumstances the Court concludes that the domestic courts’ above-mentioned approach, combined with their failure to deal with the DNA evidence submitted to them with sufficient thoroughness, amounted to a breach of their positive obligations under Article 8 to secure the applicant’s right to respect for his private life. |
| Other Article violation? | – |
| Damage awarded | Holds (a) that the respondent State is to pay the applicant, within three months from the date on which the judgment becomes final in accordance with Article 44 § 2 of the Convention, the following amounts, to be converted into the currency of the respondent State at the rate applicable at the date of settlement: (i) EUR 4,500 (four thousand five hundred euros), plus any tax that may be chargeable, in respect of non-pecuniary damage; (ii) EUR 500 (five hundred euros), plus any tax that may be chargeable to the applicant, in respect of legal fees, to be transferred directly to the account of the applicant’s lawyer, Mr B.V. Fokiy; |
| Documents | Judgment |