Fathers Also Have a Right to Social Bonding With Their Child
The Human Rights Podcast Artikel Sieben took the 10 year jubilee of the decision of the Swiss Federal Court against our complaint as a reason to reflect on the extent to which fathers remain discriminated with respect to their right to bond socially with their newborn child.
Podcast «Artikel Sieben»
The Swiss Podcast «Artikel Sieben» focuses on the European charter of human rights and its implications for the protection of fundamental and human rights in Switzerland. I was invited to share my insights from our strategic litigation against Switzerland – and to reflect on the regulatory changes that Switzerland has undertaken since our complaint.
My Contributions
When our second child was born, my husband and I decided to challenge Swiss maternity leave legislation in the interest of gender equality. At the time, only mothers were entitled to remain at home with a newborn – a rule with far-reaching implications for father-child bonding, equality within partnerships, and the mother's recovery after childbirth. Under Swiss law, the 14-week maternity leave was originally justified by two distinct objectives: eight weeks for the mother's physical recovery from childbirth and six weeks to foster bonding between mother and child. While the first objective is inherently linked to childbirth, the latter is not biologically exclusive to mothers. We therefore argued that reserving these additional six weeks exclusively for women amounted, in principle, to gender discrimination against fathers.
With the help of friends and law professors, and with the support of a number of civil society organisations, we litigated against Switzerland. The Federal Court did not essentially engage with our legal argumentation, and instead argued that the entirety of the 14-weeks maternity leave was biologically indicated.
The discussion with Christoph Keller highlights the remaining deficits in Switzerland in parental leave in comparison with other OECD countries, it emphasises the long-term benefits of parental leave for children, and touches upon the institutional intricacies of the Swiss legal system, which delegates to some extent constitutional jurisdiction to the European Court of Human Rights, but doesn't always appreciate its decisions.
We ultimately decided not to appeal the decision of the Swiss Federal Court to Strasbourg: our complaint already helped to get the political wheels in motion in Switzerland and at the time of the ruling of the Swiss Federal Court, civil society organisations were already collecting signatures for a popular initiative for the introduction of parental leave in Switzerland. We considered that we achieved the goal we set out for. The entire discussion is available here.
