High Court to state: Register gay adoptive parents on birth certificate

Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit essentially supported the homosexual couple's petition to the High Court.

By YONAH JEREMY BOB
Updated: DECEMBER 13, 2018 01:06
LGBT flag on Jerusalem's King George Street, July 31, 2018 (photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM)
LGBT flag on Jerusalem's King George Street, July 31, 2018
(photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM)
The state must register the name of a child’s homosexual adoptive parent on his birth certificate, the High Court of Justice ruled late Wednesday.
In the ruled-on case, the Tel Aviv Family Court had approved the homosexual couple’s adoption of the child back in 2015, but while the Interior Ministry had complied with that court’s order to permit the adoption, it had refused to issue a new birth certificate for the child, reflecting the homosexual adoptive parents as the child’s parents.
Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit supported the homosexual couple’s petition to the High Court to compel the Interior Ministry to issue an amended birth certificate, saying that it was in the best interests of the child, which should be the decisive legal principle in play.
However, the Interior Ministry argued there was no practical application to the document once the adoption was approved, and the state could choose to refrain from being used by the couple to make political statements promoting its ideology, which conflicts with the ideology of much of the country’s citizenry.
The justices of the High Court panel, Neal Hendel, George Kara and Menachem Mazuz, sided with the couple, saying that the best interests of the child dictated he should have a birth document connecting him to his adoptive parents and that this principle trumped other considerations.