MARCKX v. BELGIUM JUDGMENT DISSENTING OPINION OF JUDGE SIR GERALD FITZMAURICE 42 expression clearly covering that idea, let alone directly indicating it? If marriage and the founding of a family required particularised treatment under the Convention, why not the much more recondite notions of affiliation and status in consequence of birth? The natural answer is that the one was intended to be included but the other not or at all events was not, and this could be expected inasmuch as to deal properly with it, and its complications and consequences, clauses of a different and much more elaborate character would have been required. 15. This is vividly illustrated by what is said in extensive parts of the Court’s judgment. For instance, the attempts to demonstrate a contrary view made in those paragraphs of the judgment that come under the rubric lettered A - (concerning "Alexandra Marckx’s maternal affiliation") - are laboured and unconvincing. It suffices to say that, together with rubrics B and C - (concerning "Alexandra Marckx’s family relationships" and "the patrimonial rights relied on by the applicants") - they are little else but a misguided endeavour to read - or rather introduce - a whole code of family law into Article 8 (art. 8) of the Convention, thus inflating it in a manner, and to an extent, wholly incommensurable with its true and intended proportions. Family law is not family life, and this Article (art. 8) constitutes too slender and uncertain a foundation for any process of grafting the complexities and detail of the one onto the relative simplicities of the other. The pretension to do so, in order to force the case within the (actually) quite narrow limits of Article 8 (art. 8) is, as the French saying aptly puts it, "cousu de fil blanc" ("sticking out a mile")7. There is no need to comment further on rubrics B and C because the views expressed under those heads all come back to the same fundamental point discussed earlier in this opinion. Admittedly, questions of inheritance can have repercussions on family life, but so can many other things - (for instance they often cause friction or bad blood). But inheritance is nevertheless a separate juridical category. Also, in the present case, such questions do not arise sui juris, so to speak. They are derivative, arising as a consequence or sub-head of the basic question of the right of affiliation, which I consider is properly to be regarded as excluded from Article 8 (art. 8). Possible repercussions on family life are not enough to make a thing part of it. Questions of inheritance and the like therefore deal with matters that fall outside the scope of that provision as it is correctly to be understood. Article 8 (art. 8) does not confer rights of the kind reviewed in rubrics A to C. 16. It has to be concluded therefore that the principal provision invoked in the present case - Article 8 (art. 8) of the Convention - has no application to the type of complaint made, and certainly no application to the many elements, quite extraneous to Article 8 (art. 8), in regard to which the Court For the benefit of English readers, this idea is that of a dark garment sewn with white cotton so that all the tacking shows. 7