SKIRTINGO SAVIRAIŠKOS LAISVĖS IR GERIAUSIŲ VAIKO INTERESŲ PRIORITETO PRINCIPO VERTINIMO IŠŠŪKIAI BYLOS MACATĖ PRIEŠ LIETUVĄ KONTEKSTE

Abstract

On 23 January 2023, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (hereinafter referred to as the Court or the ECtHR) handed down its judgment in the case of Macatė v. Lithuania. The Court held that the distribution of a storybook under the mark ‘N14’ was intended to restrict children’s access to information which portrayed samesex relationships as essentially equivalent to opposite-sex relationships. The ECtHR gave a detailed ruling on Article 4(2)(16) of the Law on the Protection of Minors against the Adverse Effects of Public Information of the Republic of Lithuania (hereinafter referred to as ‘the Law on the Protection of Minors’ or ‘the Law’), even though the Vilnius Regional Court, which was the last domestic court to hear the case on the merits, did not refer to the Law and did not rely on the concept of the family, as the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Lithuania had already established at that point that the constitutional concept of the family was gender-neutral. Drawing on supranational and national conceptions of the right to freedom of expression, this article examines the content of the permissibility of this right for children at the primary stage of their education, and the perception of particular societies regarding the limits of the exercise of freedom of expression in the context of the principle of the child’s best interests as a priority. The content of freedom of expression and the child’s right to the protection of their best interests is examined in this article from the perspective of the sociology of law, as this is the best way to reveal the possibilities and limits of exercising the rights of the individual in a given society by describing the various factors that can affect the child through the social mechanism. Thus, in order to show the relationship between the two rights from the point of view of the sociology of law, an analysis of relevant court cases concerning access to information for children of primary school age is used.