Published on 2 April 2024
SECOND SECTION
Application no. 31052/22
Novak ĐINIĆ and Adam DINIC
against Croatia
lodged on 15 June 2022
communicated on 14 March 2024
SUBJECT MATTER OF THE CASE
The application concerns the applicants’ inability to change their ethnicity in the birth register.
The applicants are Croatian citizens of Serbian ethnic origin who live in the United States of America. When the second applicant was born in 2007 and his father (the first applicant) filed a request for registering his birth in the Croatian consulate in New York, due to his confusion of the notions of ethnicity (“narodnost”) and citizenship (“državljanstvo”) in the relevant forms, he wrongly registered both himself and his newborn son as being of Croat ethnic origin. When he subsequently asked the Croatian authorities to rectify that information, his request was dismissed by the administrative courts on the grounds that there had been no mistake in the registration and that the domestic law did not foresee a procedure for such a change.
The applicants complain about a violation of the right to respect for their private life under Article 8 of the Convention.
QUESTIONS TO THE PARTIES
1. Has there been a violation of the applicants’ right to respect for their private life, contrary to Article 8 of the Convention, on account of the domestic authorities’ refusal to allow them to change their ethnicity in the birth register (see Ciubotaru v. Moldova, no. 27138/04, §§ 49-59, 27 April 2010, and Tasev v. North Macedonia, no. 9825/13, §§ 32-41, 16 May 2019)?
2. Is it possible under the domestic law to change and/or rectify the notion of ethnicity recorded in the birth register? If so, what is the procedure for doing so? What was the first applicant’s registered ethnicity (“narodnost”) before 2007?