The Article 14 case concerned the applicant’s request to reverse the order of the surnames under which her minor daughter – born in 2005 – was registered. 

At the relevant time Spanish law provided that in the event of disagreement between the parents, the child would bear the father’s surname followed by that of the mother. The applicant argued that this regulation was discriminatory.

In 2005, Josefa León Madrid had a baby with J.S.T.S. He insisted on termination. The mother refused and cut off all contact with the father. He brought a non-marital paternity suit in 2006.

At the end of these proceedings, in which the child’s biological paternity was established, the judge decided that the child would bear the surname of the father followed by that of the mother. The applicant unsuccessfully challenged this decision before the higher courts. The domestic proceedings ended in 2012.

The ECtHR noted that two individuals in a similar situation – the applicant and the child’s father – had been treated differently and that the distinction was based exclusively on grounds of sex.

It stated that its task was to determine whether the gender-based “difference in treatment” was contrary to Article 14 in conjunction with Article 8 of the Convention. In that connection, it was for the national authorities to strike a fair balance in the present case between the various interests at stake, namely, on the one hand, the applicant’s private interest in reversing her daughter’s surnames and, on the other, the public interest in regulating the choice of names.

The Spanish government denied the existence of discrimination, arguing that the applicant’s daughter would be able, if she so wished, to change the order of her surnames once she reached the age of 18.

Apart from the unquestionable impact that a measure of such duration could have on the personality rights and identity of a minor, who would be obliged to give precedence to the surname of a father with whom she was only biologically related, the court could not overlook the repercussions on the applicant’s life too: as her legal representative who had shared her daughter’s life since her birth, the applicant suffered on a daily basis from the consequences of the discrimination caused by the inability to change her child’s name. A distinction had to be made between the effects of determining a name at birth and the possibility of changing one’s name later.

The automatic nature of the application of the law in question, which had prevented the courts from taking account of the particular circumstances of the case, had not, in the court’s view, been justified under the Convention. 

The reasons given by the government had not therefore been sufficiently objective and reasonable in order to justify the difference in treatment imposed on the applicant. There had thus been a violation of Article 14 in conjunction with Article 8 of the ECHR.