4 MENNESSON v. FRANCE JUDGMENT 1. Judgment of the Créteil tribunal de grande instance of 13 December 2005, judgment of the Paris Court of Appeal of 25 October 2007 and judgment of the Court of Cassation of 17 December 2008 19. By a judgment of 13 December 2005, the Créteil tribunal de grande instance declared the action inadmissible. It found that “the entries had been recorded on the sole initiative of the public prosecutor with the purpose, since avowed, of bringing proceedings to have the entries annulled”. It concluded from this that “an action by the public prosecutor on grounds of public policy which he himself ha[d] infringed could not be deemed admissible where the provisions of Article 47 of the Civil Code on which he [relied] allowed him to verify the validity of the certificates in any respect and to reject any request for registration that would render them binding in France”. 20. The public prosecutor’s office appealed to the Paris Court of Appeal, which upheld the lower court’s judgment on 25 October 2007. The Court of Appeal also considered the public prosecutor’s action for annulment of the entries in the Nantes central register of births, marriages and deaths inadmissible as a matter of international public policy. It substituted its own grounds for that decision, however, finding that the contents of the entries were accurate as regards the judgment of the Supreme Court of California of 14 July 2000 and that the public prosecutor’s office was not disputing the fact that the judgment was binding on France or that, under Article 47 of the Civil Code, the certificates drawn up in California in accordance with the usual procedures in that State should be deemed valid. 21. On 17 December 2008 the Court of Cassation (First Civil Division) quashed that judgment on the ground that the public prosecutor’s office had an interest in bringing proceedings for annulment of the entries since, as established by the Court of Appeal, the birth certificates in question could only have been drawn up following a surrogacy arrangement. It remitted the case to the Paris Court of Appeal with a differently constituted bench. 2. Judgment of the Paris Court of Appeal of 18 March 2010 22. By a judgment of 18 March 2010, the Paris Court of Appeal overturned the judgment remitted to it, annulled the entries pertaining to the birth certificates and ordered its judgment to be recorded in the margin of the invalidated birth certificates. 23. Regarding the admissibility of the action brought by the public prosecutor’s office, the court found that it could not be seriously alleged that the prosecution authorities had contravened public policy or disrupted peaceful family relations by requesting that the contents of an entry that they themselves had ordered be annulled, since the purpose was to frustrate