Christos Konstantinidis v Stadt Altensteig - Standesamt and Landratsamt Calw - Ordnungsamt.

• Jurisdiction: European Union
• Celex Number: 61991CC0168
• ECLI: ECLI:EU:C:1992:504
• Date: 09 December 1992
• Court: Court of Justice (European Union)
• Procedure Type: Reference for a preliminary ruling
• Docket Number: C-168/91

Important legal notice

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61991C0168

Opinion of Mr Advocate General Jacobs delivered on 9 December 1992. - Christos Konstantinidis v Stadt Altensteig - Standesamt and Landratsamt Calw - Ordnungsamt. - Reference for a preliminary ruling: Amtsgericht Tübingen - Germany. - Discrimination - International convention - Translation from Greek. - Case C-168/91.

European Court reports 1993 Page I-01191
Swedish special edition Page I-00097
Finnish special edition Page I-00109

Opinion of the Advocate-General

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My Lords,

1. The Amtsgericht Tuebingen has asked the Court to give a preliminary ruling on the interpretation of Articles 5, 7, 48, 52, 59 and 60 of the EEC Treaty with regard to certain provisions of German law which require Greek names to be transliterated into Roman characters according to a system that is phonetically inaccurate.

2. The applicant in the main proceedings is a Greek national who works in Altensteig (Germany) as a self-employed masseur and assistant hydrotherapist. According to his Greek birth certificate, his first name is *p***** and his surname is **************. He wishes those names to be transcribed in Roman characters as "Christos Konstantinidis" on the ground that such a spelling indicates as accurately as possible to German speakers the correct pronunciation of his name in Greek. He also points out that his name is thus transcribed in Roman characters in his Greek passport.

3. On 1 July 1983 he married a German national at the Altensteig registry office. His name was entered in the marriage register as "Christos Konstadinidis". On 31 October 1990 he applied to the registry office for the entry of his surname to be rectified from "Konstadinidis" to "Konstantinidis". That request was forwarded, via the Landratsamt Calw (District Office), to the Amtsgericht Tuebingen, which took the view that under the relevant provisions of German law the name entered in the marriage register must correspond to the name on Mr Konstantinidis' birth certificate. It therefore obtained a translation of the Greek birth certificate from a qualified translator, who conscientiously applied a system of transliteration developed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) (1) which resulted in the applicant' s name being rendered as "Hrestos Konstantinides", with a horizontal bar written above the letter "e" in the first name and above the "o" and "e" in the surname. The Landratsamt Calw thereupon submitted an application for the entry in the marriage register to be corrected so as to correspond to the ISO system of transliteration (except only that the horizontal bars were to be replaced by acute accents (2)).

4. The Amtsgericht Tuebingen considers that, as a matter of German law, the applicant' s name must be recorded in the marriage register as Hréstos Kónstantinidés, even though that spelling is intensely distasteful to the applicant and does not convey an accurate impression of the way that his name is pronounced in Greek. The Amtsgericht Tuebingen arrives at that conclusion by the following process. German law requires names in registers of civil status to correspond to the names recorded on a person' s birth certificate. Registers are to be kept in the German language and in the German or Roman alphabet. Foreign names written in a language that uses a different alphabet are to be rendered as far as possible by transliteration, that is to say, each character in the foreign alphabet is to be rendered by the equivalent character in the Roman alphabet. In the case of Greek names a system of transliteration recommended by the ISO is to be used. That is in accordance with Article 3 of the Convention on the Representation of Names and Surnames in Registers of Civil Status (Convention No 14 of the International Commission on Civil Status) of 13 September 1973 (Bundesgesetzblatt 1976 II, p. 1473). Article 3 provides as follows:

"Where an entry must be made in a register of civil status by an authority of a contracting State and there is presented for that purpose a copy of, or an extract from, an entry in a register of civil status or another document indicating the surnames and first names in characters other than those of the language in which the entry is to be made, those surnames and first names shall, without translation, be reproduced by means of transliteration in so far as is possible.

If rules recommended by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) exist, those rules shall be applied." (3)

As we have seen, an ISO standard for the transliteration of Greek names does indeed exist and it results in the applicant' s name being written "Hréstos Kónstantinidés".

5. The Amtsgericht Tuebingen considers that, if Mr Konstantinidis is compelled to have his name spelt in accordance with the ISO standard in the marriage register, his rights under Community law may be infringed. It has therefore referred the following questions to the Court:

"1. Is it an encroachment, contrary to Articles 5 and 7 of the Treaty establishing the European Economic Community, on the rights of a national of a Member State of the European Communities who is an employed or self-employed person covered by Articles 48, 52 and 59 et seq. of the said treaty for him to be obliged to allow his name to be entered in the registers of civil status of his host country, another Member State, against his express wishes, in a transliteration differing from the phonetic transcription, whereby its pronunciation is modified and distorted?

Specifically, does the fact that the Greek name Christos Konstantinidis (in a direct phonetic transcription) thus becomes 'Hréstos Kónstantinidés' constitute such an encroachment?

2. Does such a fact constitute an interference with the freedom of establishment and freedom to provide services laid down in Articles 52, 59 and 60 of the Treaty establishing the European Economic Community?"

The transliteration of names in general

6. Before examining the legal issues raised by the questions set out above, it might be useful to consider the general problem of the conversion of names from one alphabet to another. The approach most commonly adopted may be described as phonetic transcription. Under that method an attempt is made to convert the name from the source language (in this case Greek) into the target language (in this case German) in such a way as to convey to a native speaker of the target language the closest approximation possible of the correct pronunciation of the name. The advantage of that method is that the name will suffer the least possible phonetic distortion. The disadvantage is that, where the alphabet into which the name is converted is used by several languages and the values assigned to some of its letters vary from one language to another, a different spelling may be required for each language. Writers and publishers, who may not of course view the problem from the same perspective as the Registrar of Marriages in Altensteig or the ISO, do not appear to be greatly troubled by the absence of a uniform transliteration of foreign names. Thus Spanish newspapers speak of "Jomeini", whereas in most countries the late ayatollah is referred to as "Khomeini"; French journalists write "Eltsine", whereas English ones write "Yeltsin"; the name of the last president of the Soviet Union is written variously as "Gorbachov", "Gorbatschow" and "Gorbaciov"; and the composer known in the English-speaking world as "Tchaikovsky" is referred to in Italy as "Ciaikovski". Such variations were obviously less acceptable to the ISO when it set about the task of producing a system for the transliteration of Greek names that would be valid in all countries using the Roman alphabet.

7. In principle it is not for the Court of Justice to say that one system for transliterating Greek names into Roman characters is better than another. Since however the essence of Mr Konstantinidis' complaint is that the ISO system produces an unacceptable degree of phonetic distortion when applied to his name, it is worth considering briefly what practical effects that system has. If the version of the ISO system that has been placed before the Court were used generally, there is no doubt that it would seriously distort the spelling of many Greek names. In numerous respects it is bizarre and inaccurate. For example, the Greek letter "*", which in ancient times may well have represented a sound like the "b" in the English word "big", is in modern Greek pronounced like the "v" in "very". But the ISO system insists that it should be rendered by a "b". The influence of perceived notions about the pronunciation of classical Greek is also to be seen in the proposed rendering of the vowels "*" and "*", which in modern Greek are both pronounced like the vowel in the English word "sheep". Under the ISO system "*" is to be rendered by "e" (with a horizontal bar above it) and "*" by "u"; the former might be phonetically accurate to an English speaker and the latter to a Welsh speaker, but neither conveys the value of the Greek letters to a German speaker. In addition, the ISO system disregards the fact that "*" is pronounced like an English "v" or "f" when preceded by "*" or "*". These are not the only defects. The ISO system transliterates the Greek "*" by the Roman "g", ignoring the fact that the hard "*" has a guttural quality and the soft "*" is pronounced like the "y" in the English word "yes". The letter "*", which is pronounced like "th" in the English "thing", is to be rendered by a "t" with a horizontal bar above it. Of course it is difficult to indicate such a sound to a German speaker since it is absent from his language. But more conventional systems of transliteration write "th" for "*", perhaps because those letters have the appropriate value in at least one major language (namely, English) and perhaps because German words derived...