A Spanish woman who was mixed up with another newborn in a maternity hospital and raised in someone else's family will receive 975 thousand euros in compensation, reports El Pais.

The decision was made by the Supreme Regional Court of the autonomous community of La Rioja, the judiciary said.

Both the plaintiff, who demanded more than 3 million euros, and the regional health service can appeal the decision to the Supreme Court of Spain.

The grave mix-up had occurred in June 2002 at the San Milan Hospital in Logrono, which is about 350 kilometers northeast of Madrid. Two newborn girls, whose identities have not been revealed, were discharged from hospital and sent to the wrong parents for unknown reasons.

The mistake was only discovered years later, by chance, after one of the girls underwent a DNA test. It was only in 2021, after years of investigation by health authorities, that both women finally learned that due to this mix-up, they had grown up in different families, far from their biological parents. At the time, authorities had called the incident a “human error.”

The second victim is also seeking compensation, in the amount of nearly 3 million euros. Both women consider the initial compensation of 850,000 euros each awarded by the authorities of the La Rioja region to be insufficient.

 In one of the two cases, the competent court increased the compensation by 125,000 euros. The reasoning for the decision noted, among other facts, that after the mistake was discovered, the victim had no longer been able to contact her biological mother, who had died in 2018.

Replacing the children had caused "irreparable harm," so the claim for more than 3 million euros in compensation is justified, said the plaintiff's lawyer.