Single dads... are dads too

It’s Father’s Day in the German press. A ruling long awaited by unmarried fathers now requires Germany – whose laws give them the short end of the stick – to change its ways. On 3 December the European Court of Human Rights roundly condemned the current arrangement under which the mother in an unmarried couple gets to decide whether or not to share custody for joint children with the father. “Discriminatory,” rules the court in Strasbourg. Henceforth German courts will have to adjudicate on a “case-by-case” basis. The Süddeutsche Zeitung hails the ruling as a “milestone” that puts paid to a conception of the family “marked by preconceived and outmoded ideas of a piece with the idealised image of the mother forever sacrificing herself for her child […] and whose uppermost concern, even in a separation, is the child’s well-being”.