Claude Lanzmann’s late son’s sperm can’t father child in Israel, court says

European authorities shoot down request by French filmmaker’s widow, who says her child’s final wish before his death was to have children

By Marcy Oster 6 December 2019, 2:13 am

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Claude Lanzmann at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. (Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images)

JTA — A European court is preventing the widow of French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann from using her late son’s sperm to father a child in Israel.

Dominique Petithory Lanzmann had sought to have her son’s sperm transferred to a fertility clinic in Israel in order to fulfill his final wish to have a child, the French news agency AFP reported.

But the European Court of Human Rights ruled Thursday that an individual’s right to decide how and when to become a parent is non-transferable.

Felix Lanzmann died of cancer in 2017 at the age of 23, three years after he was diagnosed with the disease. His frozen sperm had been deposited with the Cochin Hospital in Paris.

Claude Lanzmann, who died in 2018, was best known for his 1985 nine-hour documentary “Shoah,” which was among the first widely-seen projects to educate the masses about the Holocaust.