SPAIN has been a European leader in same-sex marriage for two decades.
Now, the EU’s top court has ruled that every member state must recognise marriages performed in the country – and in every other member state.
The Court of Justice of the European Union decided this week that a same-sex marriage legally registered in any EU state must be recognised across the bloc when a couple moves or resides there.
The judges said that refusing recognition ‘infringes’ freedom of movement and the right to private and family life, both protected under EU law.
The ruling follows a case brought by two Polish citizens who married in Berlin in 2018 but were denied recognition when they returned to Poland.
The CJEU said Poland must recognise the marriage for all purposes linked to EU rights, such as residence, taxation, inheritance or parental status.
The decision does not force any member state to introduce same-sex marriage under its domestic laws.
But it obliges all states to recognise marriages lawfully registered elsewhere in the EU, even where national constitutions define marriage as between a man and a woman.
Spain legalised same-sex marriage in July 2005, becoming the fourth country in the world to do so – and the third in Europe after Belgium and Holland.
It has since registered more than 75,000 same-sex weddings, with nearly 7,000 performed in 2023 alone.
The country is now one of Europe’s main destinations for international and expat couples, many of whom marry in Spain precisely because their home states still restrict legal recognition.
The ruling has predictably drawn criticism from certain quarters, where enthusiasm for same-sex marriage is not uniformly shared
Polish President Karol Nawrocki condemned it as falling under what he called ‘the terror of rainbow rulings’, warning it threatens the constitutionally protected definition of marriage.
His deputy chief of staff Adam Andruszkiewicz, meanwhile, slammed the ruling as an ‘attempt to bypass’ the Polish constitution and impose ‘social engineering’, adding: “There is a significant risk that this sets a dangerous precedent that seeks to impose rainbow marriages on Poles… which would completely undermine the family.”
As it stands, there are four countries in Europe which have no legal recognition of same-sex unions at all in Poland, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Romania, while another seven – including Hungary – only permit civil unions.
This issue, as much as any, tends to typify the east-west divide that still exists within the European Union.
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