Supreme Court as godparent
When estranged parents prove unable to agree on what to call their children, courts have the jurisdiction to solve the problem according to a decision by the Supreme Court made public on Sunday. The ruling by Greece’s highest civil and criminal court, reported in the Sunday Ethnos, followed a suit by a man who wanted to force his ex-wife to give his father’s name to the former couple’s second son. The child’s mother had already baptized the boy after her own father. Their first child, a girl, had been named by mutual consent after its paternal grandmother. Although a lower court had rejected the father’s suit, the Supreme Court decided that the boy should bear both names – with his maternal grandfather’s coming first. Greeks commonly baptize their children after their own parents, in a practice that leads to frequent squabbles over precedence.
