THE Supreme Court has allowed children, regardless of whether their parents were married or not, to inherit from their grandparents and other direct descendants by right of representation.
In its landmark ruling penned by Associate Justice Marvic Leonen, the High Court reinterpreted Article 992 of the Civil Code, which prohibits non-marital children from inheriting from their siblings who are marital children, as well as “relatives of their father or mother.”
The decision, which was promulgated on December 7, 2021, the SC used the terms “marital” and “non-marital” to replace the terms “legitimate” and “illegitimate” when referring to children.
It acknowledged that the terms legitimate and illegitimate were derogatory when used to describe children based on their parents’ marital status.
The ruling stemmed from a case involving a woman who claimed to be the non-marital child of a man who died before she was born. After her supposed paternal grandfather died, she asserted her right to represent her deceased father — a marital child — and insisted on getting her share of inheritance from her grandfather’s estate.
Previous cases have interpreted Article 992 to mean that non-marital children are barred from inheriting from their grandparents and other direct ascendants, as they are covered by the term “relatives.”
The SC had called this prohibition the “iron curtain” rule, which prohibits an “illegitimate child” from inheriting ab intestato (when a deceased dies without a valid will) from the legitimate children and relatives of his father or mother.
However, Leonen in reexamining the rule, said Article 992 “should be construed to account for other circumstances of birth and family dynamics.”
It added that “peace within families cannot be encouraged by callously depriving some of its members of their inheritance, since such deprivation may even be the cause of antagonism and alienation that could have been otherwise avoided.”
The SC also recognized that non-marital children primarily suffer the consequences imposed by laws, despite the status being beyond their power to change, adding that some children may be non-marital because their parents chose not to marry.
It cited data from the Philippine Statistics Authority showing that from 2007 to 2016, there was a 14.4 percent decline in registered marriages in the country.
It added that other children may be non-marital because one or both of their parents are below marriageable age.
“In 2017 alone, 196,478 children were born to mothers 19 years old and under, and 52,342 children were sired by fathers 19 years old and under. There are also children who are non-marital when their mother was a survivor of sexual assault who did not marry the perpetrator, or when one parent dies before they can marry the other parent,” the SC held.
The court also departed from the regressive conjectures about family life in favor of the best interests of the child and abandoned the presumption that “non-marital children are products of illicit relationships or that they are automatically placed in a hostile environment perpetrated by the marital family.”
Likewise, the SC ruled that instead of Article 992, the applicable rule is Article 982 of the Civil Code.
“Both marital and non-marital children, whether born from a marital or non-marital child, are blood relatives of their parents and other ascendants. Thus, a non-marital child’s right of representation should be governed by Article 982 of the Civil Code, which does not differentiate based on the birth status of grandchildren and other direct descendants,” it said.
