The European Court of Human Rights ruled that the Polish government has the right to refuse to change and re-issue a long-form birth certificate to a transgender person.

The applicant (52), born a woman but identifying as a man, had asked the Polish government for an updated long-form birth certificate to reflect his preferred gender identity, Court House News Service reports. He had already obtained an updated short-form birth certificate via court order after sex ‘reassignment’ surgery, which involves removing healthy sex organs.

The short-form certificate is more common and can be used for identification and documentation. The long-form certificate serves mainly as a civil record.

The government acted in line with its policy of not reissuing long-form birth certificates for people who underwent surgery. Warsaw argued that a long-form birth certificate is a record of the actual birth, which cannot be changed. Most European countries also use this policy.

The European Court of Human Rights now ruled that the policy is not discriminatory. According to the judges, a country has the right to maintain accurate birth records. In addition, the court ruled that keeping the original birth certificate does not meaningfully impact the life of the transgender male.

The judges state that he did not “demonstrate that he had suffered any sufficiently serious negative consequences or difficulties resulting from the fact that the sex assigned at birth is still visible in the form of an annotation on his full birth certificate”.

https://cne.news/artikel/740-european-court-polish-birth-certificate-not-discriminatory-against-transgender