Research On The Legal Issues Of Illegitimate Children

As the humankind has entered the new century, accompanied by the development of society, the traditional family ethic is strongly threatened by the new value. The old regular ideas on sex, marriage and family are also impacted. In China today, the phenomenon like illegal co-inhabitance is challenging the social ethic while the emergence of illegitimate children is becoming an unavoidable social problem. During the past centuries, illegal children, which had chronically been considered as the evil consequence of the prurience, had broken the monogamy and the holiness of marriage and had long been denied and discriminated by society. The interests and rights of illegitimate children had also been impaired all along. Until latter days, with the acceptance of the ideas on natural equality, bloodline and humanism, people realized that illegitimate children have no difference with legitimate children in bearing nature; they should be treated impartially as they have the same bloodline with their parents as the legitimate children; The consequence should impute to the parents but not to the children because it is their fault but not the children's and the punishment on children would be not only unuseful but also unfair. Many countries in the world gradually affirmed their status in law and set up legal systems for protecting the interests and rights of the illegitimate children. It also becomes an important task of marriage and family law of many countries in the world as illegitimate children has become one of the weakest groups in society. It is stated in article 25, Marriage Law, China that illegitimate children share the same rights as legitimate children and none are permitted to impair or disregard it. According to this, we get the conclusion that illegitimate child are granted the same legal status in the principle of law as the legitimate children. But the regulation in our legislation is very principled and simple and is lack in the recognition and basic interests and rights protection systems. All the things lead to the need to improve the parentage law of China. This paper is mainly about the legal issues of illegitimate children, and it was written by using the relative regulations in foreign laws for reference and for the purpose to give some useful advice for the perfection of our protection system for illegitimate children.This paper was divided into four parts.Part one is about the origin of legal issues concerning illegitimate children. Firstly, this part defined the concept and meaning of the illegitimate children, and briefly mentioned the viewpoint that is held by many scholars that the concept of illegitimate children should be cancelled. That also means the dualistic division between illegitimate and legitimate children should be abandoned. The traditional concept of illegitimate children was considered as the contrary of legitimate children and was defined basing on the dualistic division between illegitimate children and legitimate children. Many scholars insisted that this discriminating concept should be abandoned because this division imputes parents'liability to the children. Secondly, this part introduces the history of the legal status for the illegitimate children and the treatments for illegitimate children at all times in all over the world. The history of the legal status for the illegitimate children can be divided into three phases including the discrimination in earlier time, the improvement in latter days and the protection at present time. Finally, it discussed the legal status of illegitimate children in our legislation at all times.Part two is about the acknowledgement of parenthood. The acknowledgement of parenthood is the precondition to protect the basic interests and rights of illegitimate children as the main contents in parentage law of most countries in the world includes the rights and duty between parents and children, and the acknowledgement of parenthood. Since there is no substantial recognition system in our legislation, the acknowledgement of parenthood lacks in the regulation of law. The paper introduced the concept, the types and effect of the recognition by analyzing the recognition systems of different countries in the world and also suggested a comparatively detailed scheme for establishing our recognition system. Part three is about the basic interests and rights for illegitimate children. Firstly, it introduced the principles of the protection for the interests and rights for illegitimate children including non-discrimination principle and the most-favored principle; secondly, then it probed into basic interests and rights for illegitimate children including custody, bringing-up and inheritance which concern their healthy growth. In the system of custody, it introduced three types including mother-preferential custody, parents-joint custody, and parents-consultative custody and also stressed on the duty of the government in dealing with the issue of the custody. In the system of bringing-up, this paper probed into several issues including the range of alimony, the protection measure for the alimony litigation and coercive execution of the alimony and mainly introduced the experience on coercive execution of the alimony in American legislation. In the system of inheritance, this part introduced the regulations on the inheritance of illegitimate children in different countries at all times and also revealed the defect in our legislation. Although the inheritance law of China grants the same right of inheritance to illegitimate children as legitimate children, but there is no regulation concerning the inheritance of illegitimate fetus, this paper also gave some advice on the protection of the inheritance for illegitimate fetus.Part four is the conclusion of the paper; it mainly summarized the above-mentioned contents and advice for legislation.