Previous Story
Two Ecuadorian children can be registered with their mothers’ surnames
Posted On 30 May 2018
Ecuadornews:
The Constitutional Court of Ecuador today ruled in favor of two English women registering with their surnames their Ecuadorian daughter, born in 2011 by artificial insemination.
A court source told Efe that, according to legal norms, the institution must notify the parties to the decision, but specified that five of the nine judges ruled in favor, three against and one did not participate in the decision.
He noted that with the decision, the Court accepts the extraordinary protection action filed by the British after a ruling by a court that had denied them an earlier appeal.
“The Court (Constitutional) gives them the reason, therefore it will be officiated to the Civil Registry so that it proceeds to register the girl with the surnames of the two mothers,” the source stressed.
In May 2012, the women, living in Ecuador, assured that they would transfer their struggle to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) if in this Andean country their legal battle to register their daughter with their surnames did not prosper.
Helen Bicknell and Nicola Rothon, a couple who had been together for fourteen years when they started their legal battle, decided to have their first baby, Satya, who was born after an artificial insemination treatment.
The mothers decided to register the girl with the last name of the two, but the Civil Registry did not allow them.
The problem was that although the Ecuadorian Constitution of 2008 recognizes “families in their different types” and gives the freedom to parents to register their descendants with the name they want, the regulations of the Civil Registry, 1978, only allows children to carry the surnames of a man and a woman or those of the single mother.
The Civil Registry, it was reported then that it had refused to register Satya because “there is no double mother or father affiliation in the Ecuadorian law”.
Rothon refused to register her daughter only with his surname as a single mother because she defended that she had “a family”.
Diane Rodríguez, national president of the Ecuadorian Federation of LGBTI organizations, told Efe that with the recognition of filiation today there has been “a small step” in the defense of rights.
The federation said in a statement that it “welcomes” that the majority of the full Constitutional Court of Ecuador issued its ruling in which “recognizes the right of a girl to be registered with both surnames of their mothers.”
“This struggle that has taken 6 years, allows the country to become an example in the recognition of the filiation of the children of homoparental families as well as a legal precedent in Ecuador, in which a couple of people of the same sex can register their children with the surname of both without this representing adoption, “she said in the letter.
In the statement, the Federation invites the Constitutional Court to approve same-sex marriage and same-sex adoption, and recalls that the first issue is waiting for the same institution to issue its opinion. (I)
