MENNESSON v. FRANCE JUDGMENT 19 was therefore the law of the country of the surrogate mother, namely, in this case, US law; under US law, the first two applicants were the parents of the third and fourth applicants, the second applicant being their “legal mother”. The Government added that in so far as they satisfied the requirements of Article 47 of the Civil Code, and irrespective of whether or not the particulars were registered, foreign birth certificates took effect in France, particularly regarding proof of the legal parent-child relationship stated in them. They specified that Article 47 was applicable to the present case despite the fact that the entries of the particulars of the third and fourth applicants’ US birth certificates had been annulled in accordance with the judgment of the Court of Cassation of 6 April 2011 and that, according to the case-law of that court, surrogacy agreements were null and void as a matter of public policy and did not take effect under French law with regard to the legal parent-child relationship. Accordingly, Article 18 of the Civil Code – pursuant to which a child of whom at least one parent was French had French nationality – applied where proof of a lawfully established parent-child relationship was provided by a foreign civil-status document of unquestionable probative force. Lastly, the Government stated that the first applicant could not recognise the third and fourth applicants in France, as the Court of Cassation had held on 13 September 2013 that recognition of paternity by the intended father of a child born of a surrogacy agreement had to be annulled where he had circumvented the law by having recourse to such an arrangement. (iii) The Court (α) General considerations 75. The Court notes the Government’s submission that, in the area in question, the Contracting States enjoyed a substantial margin of appreciation in deciding what was “necessary in a democratic society”. It also notes that the applicants conceded this but considered that the extent of that margin was relative in the present case. 76. The Court shares the applicants’ analysis. 77. It reiterates that the scope of the States’ margin of appreciation will vary according to the circumstances, the subject matter and the context; in this respect one of the relevant factors may be the existence or nonexistence of common ground between the laws of the Contracting States (see, for example, Wagner and J.M.W.L., and Negrepontis-Giannisis, both cited above, §§ 128 and 69 respectively). Accordingly, on the one hand, where there is no consensus within the member States of the Council of Europe, either as to the relative importance of the interest at stake or as to the best means of protecting it, particularly where the case raises sensitive moral or ethical issues, the margin will be wide. On the other hand, where a particularly important facet of an individual’s existence or identity is at