Spain's leading court has ordered a bishop to hand over baptism records to a person seeking to annul their membership of the Catholic Church, writes Graham Keeley.

In the first ruling of its kind, Spain's Audiencia Nacional ordered Adolfo González Montes, Bishop of Almeria in Andalusia, to hand over baptism records to the person, who wanted to remain anonymous in court.

The court ruled against Bishop González, who argued that as baptism records were the property of the Church and "not public records", the claimant had no right to them.

The case began in 2006 when an application was made to have the claimant's records deleted from Church's baptism register. It comes in the wake of a movement by those seeking apostasy, or to leave the Church, to have any records of baptism destroyed.