The panel also said pregnant women should be allowed to remarry without waiting 100 days after getting divorced as required under current law.
The proposed addendum to the civil code would assume that if a mother is remarried her new husband is the child’s father.
This would mark the first revision of the relevant provision in the Civil Code, which took effect in 1898 during the Meiji Era.
As the Civil Code now stands, a baby born 200 days after the mother’s marriage is presumed to be the child of the mother’s current husband, while a child born within 300 days of the mother’s divorce is deemed to be the offspring of her previous husband.
This has put some women in a dilemma.
Fearing that their baby would be considered the child of their ex-husbands, some remarried women have chosen not to report the birth of their newborns to local governments, thereby leaving the babies off their family registry, or koseki, depriving them of nationality.
The addendum will address this issue.
The paternity of a baby would be clear-cut under the new rule even if the mother remarries within 100 days after the elimination of the waiting period.
The panel also recommended giving mothers and children the right to deny paternity, an option that only fathers can exercise at the moment.
Under the proposals, lawsuits to deny paternity under this provision could be filed for up to three years instead of the current one year.
In addition, the advisory panel called for amendments to prevent child abuse, including adding provisions to promote respect for children as persons.
It recommended deleting the word “discipline” in the provision on parental authority.
The change is critical because it “at last reflects the perspective of protecting the interests of children”, said Fujiko Sakakibara, an attorney specialising in family law.
Japan’s outdated law has been repeatedly criticised by the UN committee on the elimination of discrimination against women.
The recommendations by the independent panel were “an indication that in this day and age Japan can no longer avoid taking action against its discriminatory law”, Sakakibara said.
Still, the revision would not represent a silver bullet.
It does not truly resolve “the fundamental problem of children with no family registries”, said Mayumi Ichikawa, a representative of a non-profit that supports such individuals.
This is because the addendum would not do away with the provision that assumes a child born within 300 days of the mother getting divorced is the offspring of her previous husband.
This means the 300-day rule would still apply if the divorced woman was not yet remarried.
If a woman left her abusive husband and he refused to agree to a divorce, the woman could “decide not to report the birth of a baby to keep the child off his family registry”, said Ichikawa.
This is a common reason why some individuals have no family registries.
More than 70% of the country’s 825 unregistered people – or 591 – as of January 2022, said this was the reason they had not been registered, according to a justice ministry survey.
The panel will submit its recommendations to Justice Minister Yoshihisa Furukawa on Feb 14.
The ministry will seek to pass legislation amending the current law this year.
Similar remarriage bans on women have been lifted in other countries to abolish gender inequality.
Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland all did away with comparable laws in the late 1960s, followed by nations such as Spain in 1981 and France and South Korea in 2005, according to the justice ministry and other sources.
No such ban existed in the US, the UK, China or Canada.