Zbornik Radova Pravnog Fakulteta u Nišu (Jan 2017)
The paternal right to respect for family life: Judgments of the European Court of Human Rights against the Republic of Croatia
Abstract
Right to respect for family life is a fundamental human right enshrined in Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR). The scope of the right to respect for family life is subject to evolutive interpretation of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). So far, the Court has delivered numerous judgments concerning parental rights, including the fathers' right to respect for family life. For example, the Court has decided cases where the applicant complained that his child had been placed for adoption without his knowledge or consent (Keegan v Ireland), where the applicant - a homosexual living with another man - was prevented from exercising contact rights with his daughter (Salgueiro da Silva Mouta v Portugal), where the German law did not provide a possibility to the applicant, unlike to divorced fathers and mothers, to be granted joint custody without the mother's consent (Zaunneger v Gremany), or where the father was unable to exercise his contact rights in relation to his son during the course of divorce proceedings (Kilic v Turkey). The central part of this paper are the Court's judgments in three cases against Croatia (Gluhaković v Croatia, Krušković v Croatia, and Ribić v Croatia), where the applicants (fathers) filed complaints claiming a violation of their right to respect for private and family life. In all these cases, the Court found a violation of the applicants' right to respect for family life. The judgments are discussed in detail, together with the problems regarding the implementation of these judgments.
