1. INTRODUCTION

The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR or the Convention) and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) have a huge impact on the development of family law within the Member States. Traces of the Strasbourg Court’s case law can be found in all corners of this area of law. It is, even for interested family lawyers, who keep pace with the press releases of the Court on a regular basis, rather difficult to fully appreciate all of its family law-related decisions. These decisions often concern rather complex details of national family law; and it requires some effort to understand whether a certain decision also has influence for one’s own legal system, for example when deciding – as the editor of a national family law journal – whether a decision on the family law of another Member State of the Council of Europe should be published. If it is decided that a decision should be published in the journal, this requires it to be translated and edited in order to make it digestible for the domestic audience, especially for practitioners. Hence, the rich case law is not always easily accessible, and case reports are essential.

As it is difficult to provide a comprehensive overview of the family law impact of the ECHR, this chapter will provide a sketch of the influence of the Convention on the development (and maybe even modernisation) of one small area of national family law: the legal status of biological fathers, which is rather weak in most jurisdictions, at least in cases where there is also a social father who, at the same time, enjoys legal fatherhood, in particular as the husband of the mother. Such cases are not uncommon: they encompass scenarios where married mothers have conceived a child outside marriage, but also scenarios where the relationship between the mother and the father broke up before the child was born, and the mother has found another partner who has assumed the role of father – a social father – to the child. Cases of sperm donation also fall into this category, where the social father did not contribute his gametes, which originated instead from a (known or anonymous) donor as the biological father.