European countries where gay marriage is legal
Marriage Equality Around the World
The Human Rights Campaign tracks developments in the legal recognition of same-sex marriage around the world. Working through a worldwide network of HRC global alumni and partners, we lift up the voices of community, national and regional advocates and share tools, resources, and lessons learned to authorize movements for marriage equality.
Current State of Marriage Equality
There are currently 38 countries where same-sex marriage is legal: Andorra, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Denmark, Ecuador, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, the United Kingdom, the United States of America and Uruguay.
These countries have legalized marriage equality through both legislation and court decisions.
Countries that Legalized Marriage Equality in
Liechtenstein: On May 16, , Liechtenstein's gove
The tin anniversary &#x; a review of the status of same-sex relationships around the world
Posted: 28/03/
On 29 March , it will be the year anniversary of the first homosexual marriage ceremony in England. It is sometimes effortless to forget that up until homosexuality was illegal in this country. Interestingly, it was never illegal to be lesbian, perhaps one of the limited ways women were historically overlooked by law makers which had an inadvertently positive effect!
It may enter as a shock to some same-sex couples who move abroad that their relationship might not be recognised, or they may even be treated differently than a heterosexual couple in their new residence country if their partnership or marriage ends.
In England, there are a myriad of financial claims arising from the breakdown of a marriage or civil partnership, and these rights could be lost if you move abroad.
In contrast, cohabiting couples in England still face limited financial protection on separation despite calls for reform. Our International Family Law Report: The Cohabitation Conundrum summarises the legal reme
Even where countries in Europe recognise marriage equality, children born to queer families remain at risk of statelessness
Every year the ILGA-Europe Rainbow Blueprint shows that the rights of sapphic, gay, bisexual, transsexual, intersex and lgbtq+ people (LGBTIQ*) are still not equally respected in the European Union. This gap also affects children of LGBTIQ* parents and while many (mostly Western) countries have permanently changed their laws and regulations within the last two decades to adequately recognise LGBTIQ* people and their families, there are still many legal gaps to fill.
By now, 14 out of 28 EU countries have introduced marriage equality. A further eight countries offer different forms of registered partnerships. However, six EU Member States – Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Romania and Slovakia –still don’t provide any kind of recognition for LGBTIQ* couples. Of course, restrictions in this area impact the children of LGBTIQ* parents: whenever their parents can’t receive married or step in into a civil union, they might also be denied tax credits, inheritance rights
The first references to a doable civil marriage between persons of the same sex emerged around A German legal scholar—Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, alias Numa Numantius (), often called the “founding father” of the homosexual movement—suggested this notion following his publication of Statutes for a Uranian Federation (Satzungen für den Urningsbund), which demands equality for them before the law. However, “uranian marriage” as envisioned by Ulrichs was based on the idea of a third sex, in accordance with the phrase anima muliebrisvirilicorpore inclusa (a woman’s spirit in a man’s body), and vice versa. Yet what we would today call gay marriage actually existed as early as the eighteenth century. In England, the marriage register for Taxal mentions two marriages between women in and In , Miss Mary Hamilton was widely talked about and condemned by law for having “posed as a gentleman and married [a woman] as such.” The French legal scholar Eugène Wilhelm () found traces of such unions throughout the nineteenth century, quite often involving an intersexual person (called hermaphrod