Evalution of Judicial Decisions Regarding Child’s Surname

Being part of an individual’s personality, surname is regulated under the Surname Law 2525 and the Civil Code 4721. Pursuant to the Turkish Civil Code, the principle of patrilineal descent is adopted in determining a child’s surname and a child acquires his/her surname by birth. Pursuant to the above-mentioned regulation, the surname of a child born in marriage is that of his/her father’s. A child’s surname shall not change even in the event of father s death or divorce of parents. In other words, a woman who is entrusted with the custody of the child cannot pass her surname to the child and the child s surname remains to be the father s surname since the surname is based on the principle of patrilineal descent and there is no regulation available that provides that the child whose custody is entrusted with the mother can get his/her mother s surname. This gives rise to various problems in practice. The child having a different surname from that of the mother causes him/her to be teased by friends, forces him/her to explain that his/her parents are divorced, and impacts the psychology of the child adversely. The purpose of the study is to identify how applications for surname change due to the difference of surnames of the child and the mother who has the custody of the child are adjudicated by courts and to what problems the different surnames of the mother and the child give rise in the child s school life. The study employs a qualitative research method. In line with the research objective, the document review technique was adopted as data collection tool. In this research, a total of eight decisions dating the years between 2011 – 2015 were examined including the various decisions of the Civil Chambers of High Court of Appeals and the Constitutional Court s decisions for annulment and on individual applications. In the decisions examined, it was seen that the child s surname was reviewed based on the custody provisions instead of the provisions of patrilineage and justices tend to ignore the Convention on the Rights of the Child (article 12, in particular) and the principles of children law while settling the surname change cases.