Concurring opinion of the Judge Mijović in the case of Ciubotaru v. Moldova, No. 27138/04, ECtHR (Fourth Section), 27 April 2010

Inability of a Moldovan citizen to change his ethnic affiliation in official registers.

Art. 8 ECHR

1. A possible infringement of Article 8 ECHR should have been based on the refusal of the authorities to accede to the applicant's request to amend the population registers in such a way as to reflect his ethnic identity and not on the applicant's inability to produce subjective evidence in support of his wish to change his ethnicity.

2. Ethnicity is not to be considered as a legal and objective concept, but as a political and subjective one. It has not been demonstrated in the present case that there are any objective parameters for establishing affiliation to a particular ethnic group, nor any legal consequences for an individual establishing such affiliation. Thus, it seems correct to consider self-identification primarily as a matter of personal perception rather than a matter based on objective grounds, which is why the choice to declare (or not) membership of an ethnic group must be respected in any case, regardless of the existence of objective elements.