Justice – Photo © James Steidl – Fotolia
(LUXEMBOURG) – Germany is under no obligation to recognise extra noble titles awarded to himself by a former German national while in Britain, according to a ruling from the European Court of Justice Thursday.
Nabiel Peter Bogendorff von Wolffersdorff, born in Germany in 1963, lived in Britain between 2001 and 2005, where he decided not only to become British but also to confer upon himself the titles of ‘count’ and ‘baron’ by changing his name.
Mr Bogendorff thus became Mr Peter Mark Emanuel Graf von Wolffersdorff Freiherr von Bogendorff, i.e . the Count of Wolffersdorff and Baron of Bogendorff.
Returning to Germany, Mr Peter Mark Emanuel Graf von Wolffersdorff Freiherr von Bogendorff asked the Registry office of the city of Karlsruhe to register that change and enter in the register his new forenames and surname acquired under English law.
The office refused his request, leading to Mr Bogendorff von Wolffersdorff bringing an action before the Amtsgericht Karlsruhe (District Court, Karlsruhe), which asked the Court of Justice whether EU law precludes such a refusal of recognition.
While the EU Court found that the refusal by authorities of one Member State to recognise the names of one of its own citizens who had acquired other names in a different state did constitute a restriction on the freedoms conferred under Article 21 TFEU on all citizens of the EU, it also ruled that that state was justified in applying a restriction “by public policy considerations”.
This, says the Court, is because the Weimar Constitution of 1919 abolished the privileges and titles of nobility and prohibited the creation of titles giving the appearance of noble origins in order to ensure equality before the law of all German citizens.
Therefore adopting fresh abolished titles of nobility “would run counter to the intention of the German legislature for German nationals, using the law of another Member State, Systematic recognition of changes of name such as that at issue in this case could lead to that result.”
And so the official judgement of the Court is that “the authorities of a Member State are not bound to recognise the name of a citizen of that Member State when he also holds the nationality of another Member State in which he has acquired a name which he has chosen freely and which contains a number of tokens of nobility, which are not accepted by the law of the first Member State, provided that it is established, which it is for the Amtsgericht to ascertain, that a refusal of recognition is, in that context, justified on public policy grounds, in that it is appropriate and necessary to ensure compliance with the principle that all citizens of that Member State are equal before the law.”
So Mr Bogendorff von Wolffersdorff can be known as Peter Mark Emanuel Graf von Wolffersdorff Freiherr von Bogendorff but his nobility will not be recognised in Germany.
