“Your passport please?”. Alexandros, 4, gives his British passport to a policeman at the exit of Eleftherios Venizelos airport. He looks up at him, smiling with his brown eyes, and, accompanied by his two mothers, walks to the baggage claim area. The family of three, based in London, visits Alexander’s parents’ home, Greece, three to four times a year. He is eligible to enter as a British citizen. “It’s not easy to find a Greek nanny in London,” Katerina tells me, welcoming me to her home in Glyfada. “However, we managed, and therefore, two days a week, a girl from Greece looks after our son.” Alexander, surrounded by his cousins, is playing in the next room.

Katerina and Irini met about ten years ago in the UK. Both children of the Greek diaspora, they lived in many foreign countries, but ended up in multicultural London. “We once tried to have a baby and decided that we wanted to live together,” says 50-year-old Irini. Same-sex couples in London do not face difficulties in everyday life – formally and effectively. “We never felt a critical eye on us.” However, it took time for both families to accept their decision to live together. However, today they fully support not only the choice of their children, but also the upbringing of their grandson. “We got married in London in 2015, it was a very simple process from a bureaucratic point of view,” they recall, “after the town hall we had a big party.” With even stronger feelings, the day of Alexander’s baptism by the Orthodox is imprinted in their memory. “The Church warmly received us as a family,” says Katerina, “we had a brilliant ceremony, which was attended by our entire circle.” They themselves hesitated at first, but dared to approach the priest when they learned that he had baptized other children of same-sex couples in London.

In Britain, same-sex couples of women are eligible to undergo artificial insemination techniques with the help of a male donor, due to which one of the two becomes pregnant. Both are automatically recognized as parents. “In England we are both equally recognized as Alexander’s parents.” Alexander, born in 2018, received British citizenship. In view of Brexit, his mother, Irene, arranged for him to become a British citizen, although their child would still accept him, since the UK has a jus soli citizenship system (whoever is born in its territory receives British citizenship). “It is important for us that both of Alexander’s parents are considered in Greece, and also that the child has a Greek passport.” Thus, they decided to start a legal battle to get the Greek state to recognize their family. “The motivation to go on this adventure is not only symbolic, but also emotional,” they add. “Just as some others have stood up and fought for the LGBTI community in the past, we also want to make an effort for our child, as well as many other children who will be born in the future into this family structure.”

“Katerina and Irini are obviously not the first Greek couple to have a child together abroad,” notes Dr. Kostas Rokas, lecturer in the Faculty of Law at the University of Nicosia and their lawyer, who, along with Mr. Giannis Ioannidis, is a lawyer and first vice President of the Hellenic Union for Human Rights, jointly committed themselves to representing the couple before the Greek administrative and judicial authorities. “The partial ‘solution’ reached by the previous couples was to be referred to a special registry office, i.e. to the competent office of acts of personal status of Greeks abroad, which mentions as mother only the woman who conceived a child, silent about the existence of the second, as well as about marriage, which in many cases took place. In France, Belgium, Spain, Sweden and, of course, in the UK, marriage is legal and, thanks to the use of artificial insemination by same-sex couples, the simultaneous recognition of two persons of the same sex as parents. In other EU countries, the child is adopted by one of the members of the couple. “There are de facto children in Greece who were born this way and grow up with two parents of the same sex, but the second parent is literally a meteor “invisible” to the system,” explains Mr. Ioannidis.

The EU court ordered Bulgaria to recognize both parents in a legal marriage in Spain.

The ambition of the two lawyers is, of course, to use the existing legal framework and, in particular, the jurisprudence of European courts for the benefit of all these families. “There are two recent decisions of the Court of Justice of the European Union that deal with similar family law cases,” they stress. In the first, a pair of women, one British and another Bulgarian, who married and had a child in Spain, asked Bulgaria to decipher the child’s birth certificate so that the child could freely enjoy their rights as an EU citizen, also considering Brexit. The Bulgarian authorities refused, as it was contrary to their national legislation. However, subsequently, when the family challenged this refusal in court, the Member State sent preliminary questions to the EU Court of Justice. (DEE). The CJEU’s response, although carefully and rigorously worded, can significantly affect the fate of same-sex parent couples.

“The CJEU does not say that the Bulgarian authorities are obliged to issue a birth certificate where two women will be listed as mothers,” says Dr. Rokas, “but indicates that it is obliged to accept a birth certificate from another member of the state.” In essence, the Court does not obliges member states to change their family law “but rely on foreign certificates”.

As a first step, two Greek lawyers submitted a request to a special registry office for a transcription of Alexander’s birth certificate. “Spetszags rejected the request, noting for the first time that it does not dispute the fact that the child was related to both women.” He justifies the refusal by resorting to standard reasoning, that is, the documents he uses do not have the form that says “parent 1” and “parent 2”. On the basis of these data, the special registry office considers that the transcription of the act of birth in a foreign country would be contrary to public order. Their next step is to go to the civil courts to challenge the denial of service.

“With the cohabitation agreement, we finally solved the problems of a married couple, but left aside the weakest link – children,” emphasizes Ms. Stella Belia, President of Rainbow Families, and adds: “Although we are a child-centered society, we allow discrimination minors because of their parents’ relationship.”