"One stumble over the cuckoo's
nest"
In one of its recent decisions, the Austrian Supreme Court dealt
with the so-called "false father regress", and the
question whether it is legally compliant to claim back maintenance
payments made in the erroneous belief that a child is one's own
child.
Unlike the title suggests, the case at hand has less to do with
the movie classic by Miloa Forman, but rather with the notorious
habits of the bird itself.
The essential fact was that an alleged "father", after
the divorce, fulfilled his maintenance obligation for the child
born by his then wife. At no time, however, was the
"father" aware that the child was not in fact his own
child but had been conceived in the course of the woman's
extramarital
