Ask a Goan lawyer where the Portuguese Civil Code of 1867 deals with adoption and you will be met with a careful silence, because the honest answer is that it does not. The Code that governs marriage, filiation and succession across the territory contains a meticulous architecture for recognising natural children — perfilhacao — but no chapter, section or article creating an adoptive bond between strangers in blood. For aspirants this is the single most counter-intuitive fact about the topic: the question "adoption under the PCC" is really a question about an absence, and about the three distinct legal regimes that have rushed to fill that void — the Code's own law of legitimation and acknowledgement, the customary Code of Usages and Customs of Gentile Hindus of Goa preserved by the Decree of 16 December 1880, and the modern secular adoption statute, the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act. This chapter maps all three, anchors every proposition in the bare provisions and in the Supreme Court's pronouncements on Goan law, and shows why "there is no adoption in the PCC" is the beginning of the analysis, not the end of it.
The Missing Chapter: Why the PCC Has No Adoption
The Portuguese Civil Code of 1867 — promulgated in Portugal in 1867, brought into force in 1868 and extended to the overseas provinces, including Goa, Daman and Diu, by the Decree of 1869 — is an exhaustive code of more than 2,500 articles. It legislates for capacity, marriage, the legitimacy and legitimation of children, parental authority, guardianship, property, contracts and succession. What it conspicuously does not legislate for is adopcao, adoption. The institution that Roman law had known as adoptio and adrogatio, and that the Code Napoleon retained, was deliberately left out of the 1867 Portuguese codification; adoption was only reintroduced into Portuguese law by the new Civil Code of 1966, which never applied in Goa because Goa had been liberated in 1961 and the 1867 Code was frozen here as it then stood.
The consequence is decisive. A student must resist the instinct to hunt for an "adoption article" in the Goan Code — there is none to be found, and any answer that invents one is wrong. The Code's family-law title moves from legitimate children (Articles 101 onwards) straight to legitimated children and the acknowledgement of natural children, and thence to parental authority and guardianship, without ever erecting an adoptive relationship. The intellectual task, therefore, is to understand what the Code does provide in place of adoption, and to identify the external regimes that supply genuine adoption to Goans today. For the wider context of how this frozen 1867 Code came to govern Goa, see the chapter on the Goa, Daman and Diu (Administration) Act, 1962.
Perfilhacao: The Code's Real Mechanism for the Childless
If the PCC offers no adoption, what does it offer to a person who wishes to bring a child into a legal parent-child relationship? The Code's answer is perfilhacao — the acknowledgement, recognition or "legitimation" of one's own natural child — together with the broader law of legitimation. It is critical to grasp the difference: adoption creates a parent-child bond where none existed by blood; perfilhacao merely gives legal status to a blood relationship that already exists outside marriage. The Code knows the second but not the first.
The architecture sits across three doctrines. First, legitimation by subsequent marriage: under Article 119, marriage legitimates the children born before it to the spouses, provided they are recognised in the marriage or birth records or in a public deed or will, or their filiation is proved by suit. Article 121 then declares that children legitimated by subsequent marriage "are treated as legitimate children for all purposes" — full equality with marital children. Second, legitimation through acknowledgement (Articles 122 to 129), the core of perfilhacao. Third, the law of investigation into paternity and maternity (Articles 130 to 133) for cases where recognition is contested or sought through the courts. None of these creates a fictional parentage; each presupposes an actual biological link. This is the conceptual fault-line on which the entire topic turns, and it connects directly to the Code's treatment of marriage and its forms — see Marriage under the PCC: Forms.
Who May Be Acknowledged — and Who May Not
Article 122 lays down the general rule that all illegitimate children may be legitimated by acknowledgement, but then carves out two prohibited classes: adulterine children and incestuous children. The Code defines these with precision. By the first paragraph of Article 122, adulterine children are those born to a person who was married at the time of conception, from someone other than the spouse. By the second paragraph, incestuous children are the children of relatives by consanguinity or affinity in any degree in the direct line, and the children of relatives by consanguinity up to the second degree inclusive in the collateral line.
This exclusion has a hard edge. A child who falls within either prohibited class cannot be acknowledged at all, and Article 134 gives such a child a name — a spurious child (filho espurio). Article 135 then fixes the bleak legal position of spurious children: they have only the right to demand necessary maintenance from their parents, and "in everything else they are taken as complete strangers to their parents or to their families." Article 136 confines even that maintenance claim to cases where paternity or maternity has been proved in controverted civil or criminal proceedings or in the situations contemplated by Article 130. The morality of nineteenth-century Portugal is thus written into the Goan Code: the blameless child of a forbidden union is denied status, a feature that modern constitutional values would struggle to defend but which the frozen Code preserves.
Form and Formalities of Perfilhacao
The Code is formal about how acknowledgement is effected. Under Article 123, legitimation by recognition may be made by both parents by common agreement, or by either of them separately, but only if it is made in the registration of birth, or in a public deed, will or public indenture. A casual or oral acknowledgement carries no legal weight; the act must be solemnised through one of these instruments and entered in the civil registry. This dovetails with the Code's broader insistence on registration, examined in the chapter on the Registration of Marriages and the Civil Registry.
Article 124 imposes a notable restriction on separate recognition: where a father or mother recognises the child alone, the recognising parent must not disclose in the instrument the name of the other parent, nor mention circumstances by which that person could be identified — a privacy safeguard for the unnamed parent. Article 125 sets a biological-plausibility condition for separate recognition, requiring that the recognising parent was capable of contracting marriage during the first one hundred and twenty of the three hundred days preceding the child's birth. Article 126 protects the autonomy of an adult: a child who is of full age cannot be legitimated without its own consent. Article 127 allows a minor who has been legitimated to challenge the legitimation within four years of attaining emancipation or majority, and Article 128 permits both the recognition and any challenge to it to be contested by all persons having an interest. The scheme is thus tightly procedural, leaving little room for informal arrangements of the kind that pass for "adoption" in lay usage.
The Effects of Acknowledgement: Name, Maintenance, Succession
Recognition is not a hollow status. Article 129 enumerates the rights that a child legitimated voluntarily or by judgment acquires: to use the surname of the parents; to be maintained by them; and to succeed to the ascendants or to share in the inheritance in accordance with Articles 1989 and 1992. The succession dimension is where acknowledgement matters most in practice. Article 1989 provides that illegitimate children and their descendants, once legitimated by recognition or legally recognised, succeed on intestacy not only to their parents but also to the other ascendants. Article 1992 then limits the aggregate share of illegitimate children recognised after marriage, dividing the available third proportionately among them where it is insufficient to satisfy their claims under Article 1785.
The point for the examinee is that perfilhacao delivers most of the practical consequences that an aspirant might expect adoption to deliver — a surname, a maintenance obligation and a place in the line of succession — but it does so only for a person who is in truth the natural child of the acknowledging parent. It cannot manufacture a parental link to a child who is a stranger in blood. That gap is precisely what the customary and statutory regimes discussed below were summoned to fill.
Hindu Adoption in Goa: The Code of Usages and Customs of 1880
For the Hindus of Goa, genuine adoption survives — but it lives outside the Portuguese Civil Code proper, in the Code of Usages and Customs of Gentile Hindus of Goa, preserved by the Decree of 16 December 1880. When the 1867 Code was extended to Goa, the Portuguese legislature did not abolish the special and peculiar usages of the Gentile (non-converted) Hindus of both the Old and New Conquests; instead it safeguarded them by this Decree. The 1880 Code is therefore a parallel customary regime, and its surviving operative content today is concentrated in two areas: the constitution and reconstitution of the Hindu joint family, and adoption.
The adoption permitted by the 1880 Code is recognisably the classical Hindu institution: it is available to a Hindu who lacks a male heir, and it operates to secure the continuity of the family and the performance of religious duties. This is why, uniquely within Goa's otherwise common family law, a Goan Hindu can adopt under a customary code while a Goan Christian or Muslim cannot — the much-celebrated "uniformity" of Goan family law has a customary exception built into it at the point of adoption. The 1880 Code thus sits alongside the PCC rather than within it, an instance of the layered legal inheritance that the chapter on Universal Application explores in detail.
The Male-Only Rule and Its Constitutional Challenge
The 1880 Code carries a gender restriction that has become the most litigated feature of adoption law in Goa: in the absence of legitimate male issue, the customary law permits only a male child to be adopted by a Gentile Hindu. A daughter cannot be adopted to fill the place of an absent son. The rule is a direct inheritance of the classical preoccupation with a male line for the continuation of the family and the discharge of religious obligation, and it sits uneasily with the constitutional guarantees of equality and non-discrimination on the ground of sex under Articles 14 and 15 of the Constitution.
That tension is now before the courts. A petition challenging the provision that permits only males to be adopted by Gentile Hindus in the absence of legitimate male issue is pending before the High Court of Bombay at Goa (in the public-interest proceedings numbered PIL/WP/6/2021). The aspirant should treat the male-only rule as good law for the present — it has not been struck down — while flagging that its constitutional validity is sub judice and that any answer should acknowledge the pending challenge. It is a vivid illustration of how a frozen colonial-era custom can collide with the living constitutional order.
HAMA and Why It Does Not Govern Goan Hindu Adoption
Students often assume that the Hindu Adoptions and Maintenance Act, 1956 (HAMA) must apply to Hindus in Goa, since by its own terms HAMA extends to the whole of India. The answer is more subtle. HAMA applies to persons who are Hindus by religion and to those who are not Muslims, Christians, Parsis or Jews, unless it is proved that such a person would not have been governed by Hindu law in respect of the matter in question; the Act preserves the operation of custom where a special custom governs. In Goa, the Hindus' adoption is governed by the special and peculiar custom codified in the 1880 Decree, which the Portuguese legislature expressly safeguarded and which the post-liberation legal order continued.
The practical position, therefore, is that a Goan Hindu seeking to adopt looks first to the customary Code of Usages and Customs of 1880, not to HAMA's substantive scheme, because that customary code is precisely the kind of special usage that HAMA leaves untouched. This is a point of fine doctrine that rewards a careful answer: it is not that HAMA does not "reach" Goa geographically, but that the customary regime preserved for Goan Hindus occupies the field of their adoption. The interaction between the all-India statutory inheritance and Goa's preserved customs is the recurring theme of this subject, treated more generally in the Introduction to the Code.
Secular Adoption: The Juvenile Justice Act Route
For Goans who are not Gentile Hindus — Christians and Muslims in particular — and for anyone who prefers a religion-neutral route, the modern path to adoption is the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, a secular all-India statute administered through the Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) and the prescribed agencies and procedures. This is the regime that supplies a true adoptive bond to those whom neither the PCC's perfilhacao nor the Hindu customary code can serve.
The constitutional foundation for this secular route was laid by the Supreme Court in Shabnam Hashmi v. Union of India, (2014) 4 SCC 1. The petitioner, a Muslim woman unable to adopt under her personal law, sought recognition of a right to adopt. The Court held that the Juvenile Justice Act is a small secular legislation that enables any person, irrespective of religion, to adopt a child, and that an aspiring adoptive parent may take recourse to the provisions of the Act regardless of the position taken by personal law. Shabnam Hashmi did not declare a fundamental right to adopt, but it firmly established that the secular statute operates across communities. For a Goan Christian or Muslim, this is the operative law of adoption, and it sits over the territory in tandem with the PCC's law of filiation.
Three Regimes, One Territory: Mapping the Landscape
It helps to set the three regimes side by side. First, the Portuguese Civil Code of 1867 itself, which provides no adoption but a developed law of perfilhacao — legitimation and acknowledgement of natural children under Articles 119 to 136, with succession effects under Articles 1989 and 1992. This serves a person seeking to give status to a child who is biologically their own. Second, the Code of Usages and Customs of Gentile Hindus of Goa, preserved by the Decree of 16 December 1880, which permits classical Hindu adoption — subject to the contested male-only restriction — to a Gentile Hindu lacking male issue. Third, the secular Juvenile Justice Act regime, available to all communities and especially to Goan Christians and Muslims, validated for cross-community use by Shabnam Hashmi v. Union of India.
The lesson is that "adoption under the PCC" is a study in pluralism masquerading as uniformity. Goa is routinely praised as the one Indian jurisdiction with a common civil code, yet at the precise point of adoption the territory runs three different regimes keyed to community and to the nature of the relationship sought. An answer that captures this layered reality — rather than reciting a non-existent PCC adoption article — is the answer that scores.
How Far the Code Reaches: Goan Domiciles Beyond Goa
A related question that examiners enjoy is how far the PCC's family law — including its law of filiation and legitimation — follows a Goan who moves elsewhere in India. The leading authority is Jose Paulo Coutinho v. Maria Luiza Valentina Pereira, (2019) 20 SCC 85, decided on 13 September 2019. The Supreme Court held that the Portuguese Civil Code, 1867 as applicable in Goa governs the succession to the property of a Goan domicile even where that property is situated outside Goa, elsewhere in India. The Code, the Court reasoned, attaches to the person of the Goan domicile and not merely to the soil of Goa.
For the present topic, the significance is twofold. First, it confirms that the Code's personal-law content — the very provisions on filiation and legitimation discussed above — travels with the Goan, so that questions of a child's status and succession are resolved by the PCC wherever the Goan domicile's property lies. Second, the judgment is celebrated for its observation lauding Goa as a "shining example" where a uniform civil code applies, and for renewing the constitutional debate around a national uniform civil code under Article 44. The adoption topic thus connects to one of the largest themes in Indian family law — the unfinished project of uniformity — with Goa as its working laboratory.
Common Errors and Exam Strategy
Several traps recur. The first is inventing a PCC adoption provision; there is none, and the disciplined answer opens by saying so. The second is conflating perfilhacao with adoption; they are conceptually opposite — recognition of an existing blood link versus creation of a fictional one. The third is assuming HAMA straightforwardly governs Goan Hindu adoption; in fact the special custom preserved by the 1880 Decree occupies that field. The fourth is forgetting the secular Juvenile Justice route and its endorsement in Shabnam Hashmi.
A model answer therefore proceeds in four movements: (i) state the absence of adoption in the 1867 Code and explain the historical reason — adoption was omitted in 1867 and only restored in Portugal's 1966 Code, which never reached frozen Goan law; (ii) set out perfilhacao as the Code's substitute, with the prohibited classes under Article 122, the formalities under Articles 123 to 128 and the effects under Article 129; (iii) describe Hindu adoption under the 1880 Code of Usages, flagging the male-only restriction and the pending Bombay High Court (Goa) challenge; and (iv) describe the secular Juvenile Justice Act route validated by Shabnam Hashmi v. Union of India, closing with Jose Paulo Coutinho on the reach of Goan personal law. Cite Article numbers exactly, and never assert a citation you cannot stand behind. This is the architecture that turns a deceptively simple-looking question into a high-scoring answer; it also rewards the candidate who has read the Introduction and understood why the Goan Code is frozen in its 1867 form.
Frequently asked questions
Does the Portuguese Civil Code of 1867 provide for adoption in Goa?
No. The 1867 Code as in force in Goa contains no provision for adoption (adopcao). Adoption was omitted from the 1867 Portuguese codification and only reintroduced by Portugal's Civil Code of 1966, which never applied in Goa because the 1867 Code was frozen here after liberation in 1961. The Code instead regulates filiation, legitimation and acknowledgement of natural children (perfilhacao) in Articles 119 to 136.
What is perfilhacao and how does it differ from adoption?
Perfilhacao is the acknowledgement, recognition or legitimation of one's own natural (illegitimate) child, governed chiefly by Articles 122 to 129. It differs fundamentally from adoption: perfilhacao gives legal status to a parent-child link that already exists in blood, whereas adoption creates a parent-child bond between persons who are strangers in blood. The PCC knows the former but not the latter.
Which children cannot be acknowledged under the PCC?
Under Article 122, adulterine children (born to a person married at the time of conception, from someone other than the spouse) and incestuous children (children of relatives in the prohibited degrees of consanguinity or affinity) cannot be acknowledged. Article 134 calls such children spurious, and Article 135 confines them to a bare right of maintenance, treating them otherwise as strangers to their parents and families.
How do Hindus in Goa adopt if the PCC has no adoption?
Goan Hindus adopt under the customary Code of Usages and Customs of Gentile Hindus of Goa, preserved by the Decree of 16 December 1880, which permits classical Hindu adoption to a Gentile Hindu who lacks a male heir. Notably, it presently permits only a male child to be adopted in the absence of legitimate male issue — a restriction whose constitutional validity is pending before the High Court of Bombay at Goa.
Can Goan Christians and Muslims adopt, and under what law?
Yes, through the secular Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act and the CARA framework. In Shabnam Hashmi v. Union of India, (2014) 4 SCC 1, the Supreme Court held that this secular statute enables any person, irrespective of religion, to adopt a child, so that personal-law silence on adoption is no bar to taking the statutory route.
Does the PCC's law on children follow a Goan who lives outside Goa?
Yes. In Jose Paulo Coutinho v. Maria Luiza Valentina Pereira, (2019) 20 SCC 85, the Supreme Court held that the Portuguese Civil Code, 1867 as applicable in Goa governs the succession to the property of a Goan domicile even when that property lies outside Goa elsewhere in India, because the Code attaches to the person of the Goan domicile. The judgment also praised Goa as a shining example of a working uniform civil code.