Italy's Constitutional Court rules single people have right to adopt

MILAN (Reuters) -Italy's Constitutional Court ruled on Friday that single people can adopt foreign children, overturning a 40-year-old law limiting adoption to married couples in a country historically marked by a traditionalist view of the family.

Other European countries, including Germany, France, Britain and Spain, already allow single people to adopt.

With applications to adopt foreign children declining, the court said the ban on single people "risks undermining the effectiveness of the child's right to grow up in a stable and harmonious family environment".

The ruling underscores the need to update Italy's adoption laws to reflect social and family changes, said Paolo Limonta, president of CIAI, an Italian association dedicated to the adoption of children from abroad.

The court, which was called on to give a judgment on international adoptions, made no reference to the norms regarding the adoption of Italian children.

The right-wing League party, part of Giorgia Meloni's governing coalition, said the current law now needs to be amended in the light of the court's ruling and the "worrying decline in international adoptions."

According to the court, Italy's law on international adoptions, passed in 1983, fails to recognise that "single people are theoretically able to provide a child with a stable and harmonious environment".

In Italy a judge has the final say on whether a person - up to now only if married - is fit to adopt a child after a thorough investigation by psychologists and social workers.

"The primary interest to be protected is that of the child", CIAI said in a statement.

"The well-being of children does not depend significantly on whether the parents in the family are married, separated, single or of the same sex, but it is guaranteed by the quality of the family relationship."

(Reporting by Claudia Cristoferi, editing by Gavin Jones and William Maclean)