Gays denied right to adopt

Jolana Navrátilová, 35, and Barbora Kárníková, 25, are celebrating the first anniversary of their registered partnership this month. The Brno couple says they love each other, are committed to each other and want to raise children together.

Yet, in order to adopt, the women would, under law, be required to first dissolve their civil union.

"I can say definitely that we want to have a child," Navrátilová said. "We would like to maybe [adopt], but ? we would have to get a divorce to adopt a child."

Like other same-sex couples living in registered partnerships, Navrátilová and Kárníková are prohibited from adopting under a contested section of the law that rights activists have long decried as discriminatory. That law, however, may be about to change.

The government's Council for Human Rights decided last month that the law on registered partnerships, which contains a clause explicitly preventing adoptions, contradicts international law and the Czech Constitution by excluding individuals based on their sexuality. The council has since urged the government to scrap the ban.

"Persons living in registered partnerships are the only group of people excluded from access to individual adoption," Lucie Otáhalová, head of the secretariat of the council, said.

Under the council's proposal, the nearly 780 gay and lesbian couples currently living in registered partnerships in the Czech Republic would be allowed individually to adopt children, but not jointly.

Otáhalová said the proposal is based on a decision by the European Court for Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, last year, which determined that a state providing legislation for individual adoption should not exclude any groups based on sexual orientation.

At issue in the Czech Republic, she said, is a single line in the current law on registered partnerships that reads: "The existence of a registered partnership prevents either of the partners from adopting a child."

Otáhalová noted that the council wants that specific line to be dropped. (Joint adoption, which is permitted only for married couples here, is governed under a separate Family Law, and does not apply in this case.)

When the law on registered partnerships was first introduced in July 2006, the ban on adoption was one of the conditions for its support by some lawmakers, Otáhalová explained.

"Its background, as I can imagine, was the fear of gay and lesbian parenting and the negative influence over children," she said.

Now that the council's proposal has been brought to the government, Otáhalová said she expects it to generate heated debate.

"I am expecting strong opposition from religious groups and right-wing individuals," she said, adding that some ministries, including the Labor and Social Affairs Ministry, have already expressed resistance, mainly based on differing views on the definition of family, fear of nontraditional families and "possibly the 'spread of homosexuality.' "

Defining 'family'

According to the Labor and Social Affairs Ministry, removing the contested sentence in the law could have unspecified negative consequences, leading to "doubts concerning parent roles and the destabilization of natural families, and thereby to the destabilization of the society as such," the ministry said in a statement.

While the general public is largely tolerant of same-sex civil unions, that attitude does not extend to adoption by same-sex couples.

A 2008 survey by the CVVM polling center found that three-quarters of Czechs said they were in favor of allowing registered partnerships for same-sex couples, but 65 percent said they disagreed with the possibility of allowing gay and lesbian couples to adopt.

Government debate on the council proposal to amend the law is expected this summer. If approved, it will then be brought before Parliament, although that is not likely to occur before the early elections in October.

Navrátilová said she and Kárníková aren't holding their breaths.

The couple are considering foster-parenting or seeking a gay couple who will help them conceive and raise a child of their own.

"We think if there are more children raised in minority groups or communities, the world will become a little more colorful, a little more tolerant," Navrátilová said.

- Sarah Borufka contributed to this report.

Wency Leung can be reached at
wleung@praguepost.com