Civil Rights – The Court of Appeal in Bologna takes a stand on the stepchild adoption and recognizes the foreign adoption of a child in favor of an homosexual couple
With a decision filed today, at the end of a long judicial process begun in 2014 that involved the Court of Minors of Bologna and the Constitutional Court, the Bologna Court of Appeal upheld the appeal filed in 2016 by lawyer Claudio Pezzi against the Municipality of Bologna and the Ministry for the recognition of an American sentence of adoption of a child by an Italian-American woman married in the U.S. with the biological mother of the child.
The Court of Appeal recognized that the refusal of the transcription of the sentence of adoption by the Bologna Municipality because “contrary to public order” is illegitimate. The Court (Judge rapporteur Mrs. Bellini) considered irrelevant that the stepchild adoption is not included among the instruments of the Italian legal system and that the international fundamental principles like the best interest of the child can actually be achieved through institutions from other countries with different historical and social development, but grounding on equal libertarian basis.
The Court, fully taking up the arguments presented by the applicant, censored the refusal to transcribe on the basis of an opinion of the Prefecture anchored on a mistaken and widely outdated conception of “public order”.
According to the lawyer Claudio Pezzi of Bologna, an expert in international law who has sponsored the child and American couple: “the measure, also for clarity and deepening of the questions, represents a further important step in the laborious affirmation of the civil rights of minors and homosexual couples in our country, reaffirming, among other things, the important principle of opening our Order to the international dimension”.
