An Italian high court has ruled Wednesday that newborns should by default bear the surnames of both parents – not just the father, as was the status quo. The Italian Constitutional Court in Rome has declared that the automatic assignment to children of only their fathers’ surnames was constitutionally illegal. The court said parents should have a say in their child’s last name, as this is a “fundamental element of personal identity”. From now on, a child will take the surnames of both parents, by mutual agreement on the order of the names, the court said. But the child could only get one of the parents’ names if the parents chose, the court said – something that would allow children for the first time in general to wear only their mother’s surnames. The rule should apply to children born to married and unmarried parents, as well as to adopted children, the court said. At the heart of the case before the court is a family of five from the Basilicata area. The two older children bore only their mother’s surname, as their father legally recognized them only later. The father and mother tried to give their newborn child their mother’s surname to align with the baby’s two older brothers, but their request was rejected because the law currently only allowed the father’s surname to be given or the two surnames. said a spokesman for Domenico Pittella, the family’s lawyer. The parents did not want to add the father’s surname to the names of their older children because their names and personal identities were already well documented, the lawyer added. Pittella said in a statement to the Washington Post that the decision was a “landmark crisis” in Italy that “recognized that it was in the newborn’s best interest for his parents’ choices to dictate his name, rather than” imposed “. from an outdated model of the patriarchal family “. It is typical for Italian women to keep their last names and it is typical for mothers and children in Italy to have different last names – a situation that is similar in countries like South Korea. The court ruling will align Italian naming practices with those of countries such as Mexico, where children’s surnames often consist of the father’s surnames and the mother’s surnames. Cecilia D’Elia, a center-left Italian MP and self-proclaimed feminist, called the current naming process “the last patriarchal mark of family law”. Giving the mother “the same dignity as the father,” he wrote on Twitter, was simply “a sign of courtesy.” Japan says married couples should have the same name, so I changed mine. Now the rule is up for debate. The Italian legislature is now in charge of passing laws specifying how the court ruling will be implemented. The Italian Minister of Family and Equal Opportunities, Elena Bonetti, said in a statement that the government supported the decision, which was “another fundamental step towards achieving equal rights between women and men in our country.” The practice of automatically assigning the father’s surname to a child was tantamount to discriminating against women and children, he told the Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera. Italy is one of the countries in Western Europe with the lowest ranking in the latest index of the European Institute for Gender Equality, which is below the European Union average. Italy has so far had “a history of male biographies,” Bonetti said. “The surname is part of one’s identity and personal history, a story we can now transmit written in female.”
