Last month, a woman in her 60s along with her daughter and two grandchildren filed a lawsuit with the Kobe District Court, asking for government compensation for causing the daughter and her children to go without family registers for a long period of time due to a provision in the Civil Code. Many women are calling for scrapping this provision, which grants only to husbands the right to request a family court procedure to negate paternal relationships with children. The Diet should act quickly to revise the law and abolish the provision, which is behind the problem of many people being unable to obtain family registers and as a consequence experiencing various social disadvantages.
The plaintiffs in the Kobe case maintain that the provision runs counter to equality under the law as guaranteed by the Constitution and are demanding government compensation of ¥550,000 each. The daughter and her children were finally able to obtain family registers several years ago — but only after the mother's former husband died, which enabled her current husband to legally recognize the daughter as his child without the former husband's involvement in the legal process.
About 30 years ago, the woman in her 60s started living separately from the former husband because he was physically abusive, and she conceived her daughter with her current husband before she formally divorced her former husband. She opted not to submit a birth report to the municipal office, a prerequisite for creating a family register for the child, to avoid the daughter being registered as the child of her former husband under another provision in the Civil Code. This provision stipulates that a child born to a woman within 300 days after divorce should be regarded as the child of the woman's former husband.