A 2-YEAR-OLD girl in Bao’an District is taking her biological parents to court, seeking to restore her legal relationship with them before attending kindergarten, the Shenzhen Economic Daily reported yesterday.

    The toddler, identified as Xiaoli, is the second child of her parents and was born before the two-child policy was officially adopted nationwide this year. Her parents had Xiaoli’s birth registered under the household of her uncle and aunt in 2014 to avoid fines. But Xiaoli has been living with her own parents since birth.

    Now Xiaoli’s family has lodged a lawsuit against her legal parents in the toddler’s name to correct Xiaoli’s relationship with her biological parents.

    As the legal procedure requires the girl to produce court evidence that she is the daughter of her biological parents, Xiaoli’s biological parents took her to a hospital for a judicial examination to prove the family’s blood ties at the beginning of this year. With the evidence, the court eventually legitimized the parent-child relationship between Xiaoli and her biological parents.

    The case is not rare among parent-child relationship cases. Before the two-child policy, many parents applied for birth certificates for their second child using their relatives’ ID cards to avoid being fined for breaking the family planning policy.

    The Bao’an People’s Court has heard 17 similar cases this year since the two-child police took effect. The number of cases is five times more than the same period last year.

    However, this is causing more trouble for these families, as they now have to undergo a legal process to have an official parent-child relationship with their own children.

    Judges with the Bao’an court also reminded residents that such cases could be difficult to deal with in a short time because a standard of the evidence has not yet been settled. Most of the cases, mainly dealing with fake or forged birth information, have been treated as “custody disputes” or “marriage disputes.”

    The judges hope that medical institutions in the city will better supervise its system for issuing birth certificates and enhance the verification of birth information required to be provided by parents.

    (Zhang Qian)