0 >Soft toy emblazoned with a name that passed up all three levels of Estonia s court system, over a two-and-a-half year period. Source: ERR
Authorities may no longer be able to refuse to register names spelled with foreign letters, following a recent Supreme Court ruling which overrode officials in the town of Rakvere who had done just that, ETV news show Aktuaalne kaamera (AK) reported Tuesday night.
The mother of the child at the heart of the case says that interior ministry intimidation was prevalent, and that the latter had joined forces with Rakvere authorities in order to steamroll her.
The Supreme Court threw out the case, concerning a child called Nelery, now aged two-and-a-half, following a long-running battle on the used of the letter y in her first name. This character does not appear in the Estonian alphabet, with ü taking the position of the same phoneme that would be denoted by y in the Finnish language, for instance.
0 >Soft toy emblazoned with a name that passed up all three levels of Estonia s court system, over a two-and-a-half year period. Source: ERR
A Rakvere mother has been involved in disputes with the town s authorities for over two years now, on whether her child s first name can be registered as Nelery , as opposed to the commoner spelling of Neleri . The furor has now made it to the highest court in the land.
Kadri Trilljärv, who became a mother two-and-a-half years ago, says she carefully chose the name for her daughter. The name is similar to her father s, and because there is a -y in both her grandmother and aunt s names, the family opted to spell Nelery with a -y too.