Unwed fathers get a fairer deal

It’s “Fathers’ Day in Karlsruhe", headlines the Frankfurter Rundschau after the German Constitutional Court’s rulingyesterday to shore up the rights of unwed fathers and bring German law into alignment with that of other European countries (except Austria). As is already the case with divorced fathers, an unmarried father can no longer be denied custody of the children by their mother, “a practice already condemned as discriminatory by the European Court of Human Rights”, notes the German daily. The judgment concerns almost half of the separated couples in the country, namely those in which the mothers generally refuse to share custody.