Discreet donors will remain anonymous. Seized by two people born in the 1980s of medically assisted procreation (AMP) after an anonymous sperm donation, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled in favor of French justice, which refused to disclose to people born from gamete donations the identity of their parents. In the 2010s, these two people requested information and went to the French courts, which rejected their requests, despite the “severe identity crisis” experienced by one of the two people.
This decision validates both the French legislation in force at the time and the bioethics law of August 2, 2021. Before this law, which came into force in September 2022, gamete donation was absolutely anonymous, and access to information on the donor was impossible (unless therapeutic necessity or discovery of a serious genetic anomaly in the donor).
Donor refusal
This legislation, denounced by the applicants, “results from the choices” of the French Parliament and is the result of “extremely in-depth debates whose quality cannot be doubted”, underlines the ECHR. This recalls that “states general” had been organized to “take into consideration all points of view and best weigh the interests and rights present”.
The ECHR therefore considers that Parliament had legislated “within its margin of appreciation” on the question of the possible right of access to origins, on which “there is no clear consensus”. With the reform introduced by the new bioethics law, a person born from a gamete donation can access the identity of the donor, but on condition that the donor accepts it. One of the two applicants actually encountered the refusal of his donor to transmit any information, and complained about it to the ECHR, which found nothing to complain about.
This system “comes from the desire to respect situations arising under previous texts and (the Court) does not see how (Parliament) could have resolved the situation differently”. The ECHR concludes that there was no violation of the right to respect for private life.