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Cancelled Pride Youth, Fri 4 Aug 2:00 PM–2:45 PM

We at Familjens Jurist take the best interests of the child seriously. To live up to that, we have to look at reality – what do children need most? Well, they need to have their whole family legally recognized. We will address this in a panel debate that we hope will be lively and engaging.

Swedish law has a narrow view of who counts as family. According to the Parental Code, a child can only have two legal parents or two legal guardians. But it doesn't always look like that in practice. Many children have more than two "important adults" in their lives. This applies not only to children in LGBTQI families, but also to children who are placed in foster homes and to all children whose parents separate and meet new partners. The law recognizes only two legal parents, regardless of what the child's family really looks like. This is out of date and should be changed.

In a committee report from 2022 (SOU 2022:38), various ways to strengthen the protection of children's family life are proposed. We welcome these proposals but they are not enough. It was not part of the inquiry's mandate to investigate whether we should recognize more legal parents than two. Why was that question not included in the assignment? If we are to take the child's best interest seriously, in the spirit of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, don't we have to adapt the law to what the child's family looks like in reality?