Attorney General's Office said paternity leave shelters the parent who has the status of spouse

The Attorney General's Office, Alejandro Ordóñez Maldonado said the paid parental leave also shelters the parent who lives with the mother and baby but that does not hold the status of spouse or permanent companion of the mother.

So said the chief prosecutors in a concept presented to the Constitutional Court in a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality paragraph 1 of Article 1 of Law 1468 of 2011, which requested the High Court to declare the constitutionality of the norm.

According to the lawsuit, establishment of paternity paid leave for the spouse and the mother's constant companion, excluding parents who do not hold the quality of spouses or permanent companions mother, violates the right to equality and fundamental rights of children.

Attorney explained that what justifies and enables compliance with the purpose of parental leave is to protect the right of the newborn to the care and love of the father who lives with the baby and mother, living the father is presumed that the Once a spouse or life partner.

For the prosecution, there is not even a suspicion on the constitutionality of minimum standard demanded, "to establish paternity paid leave for a spouse or permanent companion of the new mother, as far from finding that it be contrary to the fundamental rights of children, finds that it is very favorable to them, as the legislature expressly intended to establish for the first time this license in Act 755 of 2002 (Act Mary), since it allows not only the mother, but the father, accompany and care for the newborn child in the first days of life. "

He said that rather than a prerogative established to benefit the newborn's parent, parental leave is an instrument to guarantee the fundamental rights of the newborn child, including specifically the right to found a family, the right to love and the right to care.

Against alleged discrimination against parents of newborns who do not hold the quality of spouses or permanent companions of new mothers, to the Attorney that interpretation of the mistaken assumptions that paternity leave is a privilege to which it has right by the mere biological fact of parenthood and that the end of it is just give the parent the same or similar treatment as that granted to the mother of the newborn.

Said it is clear that all children and adolescents have the right to love and care not only in the early days of his birth but until they come of age and that these rights are guaranteed only through or by the term of paternity leave, but for many other legal and public policy and warned that, in the same direction, "it is also clear that the main reason for which there are both maternity and paternity leave (of conditions and different terms) are the needs and rights of newborns and no expectations, desires, or rights of their parents ".

The attorney said that "the family stems from the fact of paternity but the free decision of a man and a woman to marry or form a marital union" so that "when a woman gives birth to a boy or girl in a family so constituted, it does not necessarily require that his biological father is entitled to paternity leave to see properly covered and protected fundamental right to a family. "