The Advocate General at the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has called on the Bulgarian government to recognise a girl with two mothers, despite gay marriages being illegal in the country.
The judgement relates to a case involving a Bulgarian woman and a British woman living in Spain who have a daughter whose Spanish birth certificate lists both women as the girl’s mothers.
The Bulgarian woman attempted to register the girl for an identity card in Bulgaria but was denied by authorities who stated that registering someone as having two mothers was against public policy, German tabloid Bild reports.
Advocate General Juliane Kokott has ruled that Bulgaria denying identification to the child could restrict her freedom of movement and place an obstacle for the two female parents if they wished to live in Bulgaria in the future.
Kokott did question if the girl was Bulgarian under Bulgarian law, however, as one of the child’s biological parents must be a citizen — and it was not clear which woman is the child’s biological mother.
If the child is Bulgarian, Kokott argued, then the government should give the child an identity card or travel documents, although the country is not obliged to issue a Bulgarian birth certificate.
The decision comes after a 2018 ECJ ruling that stated all European Union member-states must overlook their own domestic laws on gay marriage and recognise the legal unions of same-sex couples performed in other countries.
The court ruled that member-states with traditional marriage laws may not “obstruct the freedom of residence of an EU citizen by refusing to grant his same-sex spouse, a national of a country that is not an EU member-state, a derived right of residence in their territory”.
The ruling also comes after the European Parliament voted to make the political bloc a so-called LGBTIQ “freedom zone” in March.
The vote was met with scepticism from Polish conservative MEP Ryszard Legutko, who called the proposal “absurd” and stated: “Western Europe is engaging in ideological propaganda. At kindergarten age, you want to introduce ridiculous stories about gender.”
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