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Following the enactment, in the terms of no. 2 of article no. 136 of the Constitution, of the bill that “creates the procedure for gender and first name change in the civil registry and alters the Civil Registry Code for the seventeenth time”, the Presidency of the Republic makes public the following communiqué:

1. The bill was enacted, by constitutional diktat, after the confirmation of the vote in Parliament by an absolute majority of the Members in effective office.

2. Notwithstanding this, the President of the Republic considers that the approved regime is grievously deficient in technical and juridical issues, as was pointed out in due time in the message sent to Parliament, when the bill was returned without enactment.

3. In effect, this bill does not duly take into consideration the rights of people who suffer from impairment of gender identity, insofar as it exposes them to an error in diagnosis – and to the non compliance of the basic ethical and deontological standards – since it does not guarantee the minimum control of the professional qualifications of the issuer of the clinical report.

4. The regime now approved has no parallel in any country in the world. It was possible to find in other legal systems, such as in Spain or in the United Kingdom – as was emphasized by the President of the Republic in the message sent to Parliament – balanced regimes that, whilst considering the expeditiousness of the proceeding, ensure the protection of the rights of people who suffer from impairment of gender identity and of the juridical safety and certainty associated to the public system of registration.

5. Such difficulties were pointed out by several specialists in various expressed opinions – some produced within the scope of the parliamentary legislative procedure, such as those of the Supreme Council of Magistracy or of the Law Society – relative to the approved bill.

6. As such, and is clear from the reasoning sent to Parliament in due time, taking into consideration the very negative impact that bad quality legislation undeniably induces in the operation of the juridical system, the action of the President of the Republic – in this as in all other issues – was determined by criteria exclusively directed towards the defence of people’s rights and of the superior interest of the Country.