Information Note on the Court’s case-law 70
December 2004
Mentzen v. Latvia (dec.) - 71074/01
Decision 7.12.2004 [Section IV]
Article 8
Article 8-1
Respect for family life
Respect for private life
Issuing of passport in foreign name written according to phonetic and grammatical rules of the national language, resulting in a spelling different from the original: inadmissible
The applicant, a Latvian national, married Mr Mentzen, a German national, in Germany and took his surname. She then followed the procedure to replace her previous Latvian passport, which showed her maiden name, with a new passport that would contain her new surname. Her surname was given as “Mencena”, rather than “Mentzen”, on the main page of her new Latvian passport, providing all the main information about the passport-holder. This change in the spelling of her surname was based on the Latvian rules for transcribing and identifying names and surnames in Latvian documents, which stated that all surnames and names were to be reproduced “in accordance with the spelling rules of the Latvian literary language” and “as close as possible to their pronunciation in the original language”, with the addition of an ending to reflect the person’s sex. Accordingly, the letters “tz” were replaced by the letter “c”, which read as [ts] in Latvian and were thus the phonetic equivalent, and the applicant’s surname was suffixed by the flexible ending “-a”, the feminine marker. In the section of the passport designated for “special comments”, which appeared towards the end of the document, a special entry indicated that the original form of the surname was “Mentzen”. The phonetic transcription and grammatical alteration in Latvian of the applicant’s German surname were endorsed by the domestic courts in spite of complaints lodged by the applicant. The Latvian authorities had correctly applied the national rules, intended to bring the spelling of names into harmony with their pronunciation in Latvian and to adapt them to the specific features of the Latvian grammatical system. The Constitutional Court acknowledged that this caused difficulties for the applicant in her everyday life, but stated that the Latvian transcription of a foreign name in an official document delivered by the Republic of Latvia was intended to protect and strengthen the use and status of Latvian as the official language within the national territory. Admittedly, the transcription resulted in changes to the applicant’s surname, but did not amount to a translation: it merely entailed an adjustment to reflect the grammatical features of Latvian. Nonetheless, the Constitutional Court indicated that, if the interference was not to be disproportionate, the indication of the original version of the foreign name should appear more visibly in the passport, next to its Latvian spelling. The passport is the main form of identification for Latvian nationals within the country.
Inadmissible under Article 8: The applicant had been subject to rules governing the use of surnames, and not to a forced change of surname. The implementation of a rule concerning surnames could amount to an “interference” in the exercise of the right to respect for private and family life if it had as a consequence a visual discrepancy between the surname’s new spelling and the original spelling which was sufficiently great that an uninformed observer might doubt that they concerned one and the same name. The difference between the two spellings “Mentzen” and “Mencena” was sufficiently great to provoke doubts as to the equivalence of the two versions, which could cause the applicant problems in her social and professional life, and, when the applicant and her husband were required to use their respective passports, could prevent their joint identification as belonging to the same family. Consequently, the phonetic transcription and grammatical alteration of the applicant’s surname – to the detriment of its original spelling – amounted to an interference in the exercise of her right to respect for private and family life and was in accordance with the law. The domestic authorities justified the interference on various grounds related to the necessity of protecting and promoting the official language. That assessment was not tainted by arbitrariness in such a specific and sensitive area, where those authorities were best placed to evaluate the real situation of the Latvian language within Latvia and to gauge the factors which might jeopardise it. Furthermore, in defining a language as its official language, a State undertook to guarantee to its citizens the right to use it without hindrance, by communicating and receiving information in that language. In the Court’s opinion, the measures aimed at protecting a given language were to be examined primarily from that perspective. Thus, under the Convention, it could be concluded that the disputed regulations pursued at least one of the legitimate aims listed in paragraph 2 of Article 8, namely the “protection of the rights and freedoms of others”.
As to the necessity of the interference in a democratic society, the States enjoyed a wide margin of appreciation with regard to the indication of foreign names and surnames in official documents. Admittedly, the system provided for by the Latvian rules differed from that which prevailed in the absolute majority of the Council of Europe’s member States, in that it inevitably resulted in changes to the spelling of names of foreign origin. This did not necessarily offend the Convention in an area that was as closely tied in with each society’s cultural and historical traditions. The applicant had experienced practical inconvenience as a result of the mandatory use of the spelling “Mencena” on an official document in Latvia, but the national authorities had taken measures to redress an inherent problem in the application of their specific legislation: they had confirmed the legal equivalence of the two versions of the surname, the original version of the surname was now to be inserted immediately after the main page of passports, which would make it possible to see the two spellings of the surname and verify their equivalence more rapidly, and the applicant was authorised to exchange her current passport for a new one which would comply with those new instructions. Although the inconvenience described by the applicant was not necessarily eliminated, it did not attain a sufficient level of gravity to amount to a disproportionate interference in her private and family life. The applicant had not been prevented from exercising her political, economic and social rights, taken as a whole, including the right to leave or return to the country, all of which were secured by Latvian law, and she had never been refused the right to enter or reside in a foreign country, alone or with her husband, on account of the difference in the two spellings of her surname.
© Council of Europe/European Court of Human Rights
This summary by the Registry does not bind the Court.
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