Husbands can legally take wives' surnames- SA highest Court rules

South Africa's highest court has held that husbands can now adopt wives' surnames, thereby departing from the previous legal position on the matter.

Previously, South African legislation only permitted women to adopt their spouses' surnames.

Now, the nation’s highest court has declared that men may also take on their wives’ surnames, striking down a law that prohibited them from doing so.

In a triumph for two couples who initiated the case, the Constitutional Court held that the restriction was a "colonial import" that amounted to discrimination based on gender.

Henry van der Merwe was refused permission to adopt the surname of his wife, Jana Jordaan, while Andreas Nicolas Bornman was prevented from hyphenating his surname with Donnelly, his wife Jess Donnelly-Bornman’s surname, according to the state broadcaster SABC.

Parliament must now revise the Births and Deaths Registration Act, together with its regulations, for the judgment to come into force.

The law was introduced in South Africa during the era of white-minority governance.

The two couples contended that the law was outdated and patriarchal, infringing on equality rights guaranteed in the constitution adopted at the end of apartheid in 1994.

They had already succeeded in overturning the law in a lower tribunal but asked the Constitutional Court to affirm that decision.

The Constitutional Court observed that "in many African cultures, women retained their birth names after marriage, and children often took their mother's clan name" but that this shifted after the "arrival of the European colonisers and Christian missionaries, and the imposition of Western values".

It added that South Africa had achieved a "significant advancement" in gender equality, but certain laws and traditions that reinforced "harmful stereotypes" still persisted.

Neither the Minister of Home Affairs, Leon Schreiber, nor the Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development, Mamoloko Kubayi, contested the couples’ petition, instead concurring that the statute was antiquated.

A professional body, the Free State Society of Advocates, also joined the case in support of the couples.

It maintained that by denying a man the right to adopt his wife’s surname, the law reinforced harmful stereotypes, since it deprived men of a choice long available to women, the Sowetan news outlet reported