So, you now think the Finnish law did not lead to a bad outcome in this case, but in fact the correct one?
You changed your mind?
I don't know whether this ruling was justified and
neither do you. What I'm saying is that a time limit in and of itself does make sense, whether its application in this particular case makes sense is up for a court to clarify - a court that almost certainly knew more details about the case than you or I.
Because he never consented to be a father to someone else's genetic offspring in the first place, and the time and resources he spent parenting the child after he found out, to be used against him, is a monstrous absurdity.
In every other part of contract laws, there are acts that are treated as tacit consent and legally equivalent to signing a form, and there are time limits and penalties as to stepping back from a contract.
With whom did he make a contract?
If you order a red bike but are delivered a blue one, you get to send it back at the seller's cost since you never consented to the purchase of a blue bike. If you keep it and ride it for half a year, doing so is considered tacit consent to the purchase of a blue bike, even though there is only paperwork to demonstrate you consenting to buy a red bike.
So, let me get this right: you are comparing your own genetic offspring as a red bike, and being deceived about somebody's else's child from your cuckolding wife as a blue bike? That the difference is as slight as a matter of taste in colour?
No, as you would know if you actually read my post in good faith. What I'm comparing is the act of accepting a bike you didn't explicitly consent to purchasing and doing all of the things with it a buyer would do and none of the things a person who wants to return it because it's not what he ordered with the act of accepting a child you didn't explicitly consent to raising (i.e. you only ever consented explicitly to raising your own offspring) and doing all of the things a father would do and none of the things a person who doesn't want to be the child's father would do.
If one of those decisions can be made tacitly, through your acts, why not the other? Do you feel only inconsequential decisions should be made tacitly, while more consequential decisions require an explicit, notarized verbalization?
Or do you feel the half a year is just too short to deduce a tacit decision from his actions? How long would be long enough? If he stays with the child
and mother after finding out the cheated and the child isn't his for another five years, though without ever legally adopting the child, just continuing to act in accordance with the status quo that already makes him the legal father, does he get to dump the child along with the wife if they do break up for a different reason five years later? If he voluntarily goes on to pay child support after the breakup and regularly sees his child, does he get to stop paying (5 years after the breakup and 10 years after he found out the child is not his) when his new girlfriend shows little understanding for him paying for a child that's "not even his"?
If you (at least in Austria) rent a flat on a two-year-contract, but when the two years are over continue paying the rent, and the landlord continues to accept it, you and your landlord have effectively renewed your contract. Continuing to pay/collect rent is treated as the consequence and evidence of your consent to doing so.
And you know what else happens in Austria? If you
stop paying the rent and say "I don't want to live here any more", the State does not force you to live somewhere else while forcing you to pay rent at the original place for the next 16 years.
That's not entirely true. You
will be bound by all the residual stipulations of the original contract if you let the two-year-limit slip and continue pretending that you have a contract. For example, if the original contract stipulates (as is commonly the case) that you have to give a 3-month early notice if you want to move out before the contract expires, you'll be bound by that same 3-month notice period. Say, I sign a two-year contract from June 2018 to May 2020 inclusive with an option to get out early with a three-month early notice, and keep paying rent and living in the apartment, if I today tell my landlord I found a new flat and will be out tomorrow, I still have to pay rent for the rest of November and all of December and January/February next year (the current month + 3 full months) - even though I
never signed that I wanted to keep the apartment for longer than the May 31, 2020. I'm legally bound by the terms of a contract I never signed - a renewal of our original contract in this case - in all the same ways as if I had signed it.
Now, maybe you have a hard time understanding why an option to bail out early (with a notice period that allows your landlord to find a new tenant to take over when you move out, or to make plans for reconstruction and hire people to do it) makes more sense for home rental than for parenthood, but then maybe you should just think about the difference between the two kind of obligations for like 30 seconds?
If you buy a pack of 10 AA batteries at the convenience store and at home find that what you needed was AAA batteries, they'll probably let you exchange them if you come back the next day with the unopened pack and the receipt (though they may not be legally bound to do it). If you come back with a six-month-old receipt and 10 loose batteries, you'll be laughed out the door.
More like: if you ordered AAA batteries on subscription, and you were sent AA batteries, and you wanted to cancel your subscription, the company says "too late, we are sending you AA batteries for the next 16 years, and you're going to pay for them every month, and it does not matter whether you want to use them or not".
Extremely telling that you think children are like used batteries.
I'm not saying (or thinking) children are like used batteries. I'm saying that acting as if you want to enter an contract, honoring the obligations and reaping the benefits, can, under certain circumstances, be legally construed as an an agreement to that contract, and binds you to those obligations just as much as signing it. If you didn't know that legal principle exists, I gave you a few examples where it applies. Do you think this legal principle shouldn't exist? Or do you think it shouldn't apply to this kind of case in general? Or do you feel that the court has given insufficient consideration to the potential reasons why it should not apply in
this particular case?
You obviously feel that this guy didn't get what he deserved, and I can understand that (insofar as we can trust his version of the story, which is the only one we've seen). But exactly what should be done to prevent it is much less clear.
Why should this case be different from any of the above?
For elementary reasons that I can't believe you need explaining to you.
Why should continuing to act as a father even when the child turned out not to be what he had consented to not count as evidence of wanting to be a father? When proceeding to ride a blue bike even when it turned out to be not the colour your consented to purchasing does as as evidence of consent to riding a blue bike? When continuing to pay rent counts as evidence of wanting to continue to live in a flat, and continuing to collect rent counts as evidence of wanting to rent it out for longer?
Probably because he is a human being with complex emotions? Possibly, he thought "I have treated this child as mine for x years, and of course I will continue to love her". But then, the stress of the mother's betrayal hung like a cloud over his head, and where he used to find joy when he looked at the child's face, he now only feels sadness. And he tried his best for months to let his relationship be as it was before, but to no avail, because it was simply
not as it was before. And so, like any major life upheaval, it took him a while to sort himself out.
I'm not a lawyer, and I'm not Finnish, and I'm certainly not an expert in Finnish family law, but I honestly believe that the Finnish law allows for extension of all kind of time limits if you're bona fide unable to complete the authorities' demands within the normal time. If I get a letter ordering me to pay a fine for a traffic violation in Austria, I usually have 4 weeks to lodge a formal objection. If I let those four weeks pass without action, I get to pay the fine even if I can prove that I wasn't there at the time and place. If, however, I am
prevented from doing so, the clock is effectively paused and only starts to run when I am once again in a capacity to do so. For example, I'm comatose, or in prison abroad, or in no mental state do sign anything legal - all of these constitute valid grounds for exceptions from the normal time limit. For all we know, he
could have argued that and would have gotten off the hook, but didn't because it sounded wrong even to himself - in which case your objection is irrelevant. Or his lawyers didn't think of this defense, in which case he deserves to be retried with better lawyers. Or maybe that's exactly what he argued but the judge didn't find it convincing, because there was evidence that he sort-of knew long before running the paternity test, so they decided he actually did meaningfully consent to raising a child that might not be his.
I'm fairly positive that the judge and/or jury knew more details about the case than you or I. They still might have gotten it wrong, but honestly we don't know enough to tell for sure that they did, nor where they may have gone wrong if so.
No, his humanity is simply too much. If he'd instead been a complete psychopath, and left his wife and child the day he found out, the Finnish law, and you presumably, would leave him completely off the hook.
Someone who makes a clear decision and sticks to it deserves to have this decision honoured, yes. Whether you call him a psychopath or not.
Imagine a man who is being physically and verbally abused by his wife, and it takes him seven months to sort himself out and physically leave the house and relationship. Did he consent to be with his wife for an unspecified number of years afterwards, because he stayed with her for seven months while he was being abused, and therefore consented to the marriage as it was?
I imagine that Finnish law, like the laws in other jurisdictions, contains a provision that decisions made under duress or while under incomplete possession of one's mental capacities are not legally binding. Apparently, they found no evidence that this applied when the guy decided to continue fathering his child after finding out she wasn't his genetic offspring.
