The Constitutional Court has given definitive judicial support to single-parent families. The full court of guarantees has declared unconstitutional the legal provisions that, in practice, have denied for years that these families can extend their leave for the birth of a child and enjoy not only 16 weeks but also the time of leave that would have corresponded. to the other parent. The court has upheld a question of unconstitutionality raised by Catalan judges against the articles of the Workers’ Statute that regulate these permits and, in practice, forces Social Security to recognize up to 26 weeks of leave for single-parent families.
Official data show that in Spain there are almost two million single-parent families, mostly made up of women who raise their children alone. Single-parent families that have been immersed in uncertainty for months due to the contradictory messages that come from different courts: the Constitutional Court has just openly contradicted the criteria of the Social Chamber of the Supreme Court, which has denied this right. But another department of the Supreme Court, Litigation, has been recognized in similar terms to public employees.
The Constitutional Court has established that there is discrimination against single-parent families after studying the allegations of the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia. The judges decided to go to the court of guarantees after analyzing the case of a woman who in 2021 went to Social Security to request an extended leave at 16 weeks because she was raising her newborn daughter alone. A court in Barcelona agreed with him and went so far as to double that permit, but the TSJ decided to put it in the hands of the Constitutional Court when it understood that “discriminatory treatment” could be occurring for single-parent families.
The guarantee court had been analyzing this matter for months, not with respect to this question of unconstitutionality but also to dozens of appeals from women whose claims failed before the fourth chamber of the Supreme Court. The speaker of this resource that marks the way for the rest, María Luisa Segoviano, was committed to declaring the unconstitutionality of the precept and establishing a bridge that would recognize, in practice, 26 weeks of leave for single-parent families until the legislator analyzes the norm.
In this debate, according to Constitutional sources, the best interests of the child and the conclusion that a child born in a single-parent family receives less exclusive care time have been taken into account. A debate around the Workers’ Statute and the Social Security Law in which the Constitutional Court has concluded that the legislator has not included any alternative for a single-parent family: “It is an omission without justification,” he states.
The omission of any mechanism to equate the situation of children born in all types of families introduces “a difference in treatment by reason of birth between boys and girls born in single-parent and two-parent families, which does not exceed the canon of reasonableness and proportionality, to the completely ignore the negative consequences that such a measure produces on boys and girls born in single-parent families.”
The Constitutional Court explains that as long as the legislator does not introduce the necessary legal changes to alleviate this inequality, the Workers’ Statute and the Security Law must be interpreted in such a way that a single-parent family has, in total, 26 weeks of leave: “Add to the leave for the biological mother of 16 weeks, the one provided for a different parent of 10 weeks, excluding the first 6 weeks, which must necessarily be enjoyed uninterruptedly and immediately after childbirth.
Contradictory sentences
Until now, the various claims from single-parent families had been channeled through the Social Chamber of the Supreme Court, which studies citizens’ conflicts with Social Security regarding benefits. The criterion, for more than a year, is to reject that they have the right to increase or double their permission because the magistrates understand that it is something that, in any case, the legislator must establish through a legal change and not a room of the Supreme Court. at the stroke of a sentence.
Another chamber of the Supreme Court recently ruled in the opposite direction. It was that of contentious-administrative matters, which studies, among other things, conflicts between public workers and the administration over issues such as benefits and birth permits. That court understood that the legislation discriminated against children born in single-parent families and recognized their right to extend their leave to 26 weeks, although the effects of this ruling reach only public employees. The ruling that the Constitutional Court has just handed down covers the rest of single-parent families that are not made up of public sector workers.
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