Professor Wintemute advises French parliamentary committee on same-sex marriage and adoption
Equal access to marriage for same-sex couples is the subject of two cases to be heard by the United States Supreme Court on 26 and 27 March 2013. It is also the subject of a draft Bill for Scotland published on 12 December, and the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill for England and Wales, which had its second reading on 5 February.
In France, the legislative process started earlier, when the Government’s Bill on ‘marriage for all’ was introduced in the National Assembly on 7 November 2012.
On 22 November, Professor Robert Wintemute from The Dickson Poon School of Law was the only non-French legal expert invited to speak at a hearing of the Assembly’s ‘Commission des Lois’ (Committee on Laws). He also submitted a written report to Mr Erwann Binet, a member of the Assembly and the Bill’s rapporteur (pictured below with Professor Wintemute).
His report welcomes the French Government’s decision to open up to same-sex couples both marriage (as the UK and Scottish Governments are proposing) and joint and second-parent adoption (as the Adoption and Children Act 2002 did in England and Wales). It also urges the French Government to go further by granting access to donor insemination to lesbian couples and automatic parenthood for the birth mother’s female partner (as the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008 did in the UK).
This protects the child, in the situation of the mother’s partner dying before a second-parent adoption can take place. At the moment, lesbian women must leave France to be inseminated legally. They often travel to Belgium, as did the two mothers of Sacha, France’s first baby of 2013. They are also excluded from second-parent adoption (Gas & Dubois v. France, European Court of Human Rights, 15 March 2012; Professor Wintemute had made written and oral submissions on behalf of third-party interveners). The Bill would allow Sacha’s two mums to marry, which would mean that the spouse of his birth mother could adopt him and become his second legal parent.
