TC - Case No. 1250/2022; Ruling No. 425/2024
The Constitutional Court, through Ruling No. 427/2024, ruled on the constitutionality of the ten-year statute of limitations for filing a paternity investigation action.
The controversy reached the Constitutional Court through an appeal for concrete review of a Supreme Court of Justice ruling dated 11/09/2022, which upheld the appeal and declared “the unconstitutionality of the provision in Article 1817(1) of the Civil Code, applicable to paternity investigation actions under Article 1873 of the same legal code (statute of limitations for filing a paternity recognition action).”
The judgment focused on the possibility of imposing a time limit on the right to file a paternity investigation action. It examined the limitation of the right to personal integrity, particularly ‘moral’ integrity (Article 25(1) of the Constitution), as well as the right to personal identity.
The Constitutional Court noted that the right to recognition of parentage can be limited or weighed against other legal values and is not an absolute right. According to the ruling, there cannot be “an alleged right to investigate such paternity relationships ad aeternum.” The Court reaffirmed “the legislature's autonomy in shaping the normative right to action and the negative control of constitutionality.”
However, it was emphasized that in legislative shaping, the principle of prohibition of excess must be observed. Thus, the limitation on exercising the right is constitutionally illegitimate only if the statute of limitations for filing an action to recognize rights is “unnecessary, unreasonable, or excessive, as there are no reasons to justify it”; or if “the period is so short as to make the exercise of the right unfeasible or particularly burdensome.”
Regarding the proportionality of the statute of limitations, the Constitutional Court considered it constitutionally legitimate for an individual, possessing “the available information and wishing to have their right to know their biological father recognized and the parentage relationship established, to file the appropriate paternity investigation action within a given period, under penalty of losing the right to do so, except in the occurrence of new objective or subjective justifying circumstances.”
Therefore, the right to parentage is protected, as this limitation does not prevent the right-holder from exercising it but imposes the burden of doing so within a sufficient and predetermined period.
Finally, it was noted that the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), “given the different solutions adopted in the legal systems of various States, has ruled on those that establish time limits for exercising the right to paternity investigation in accordance with the principles of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).”
In the decision issued on 05/29/2024, the Constitutional Court recognized the appropriateness and proportionality of establishing a ten-year statute of limitations for exercising the right to file a paternity investigation action.
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The full text of the ruling is available here.
