“Gay marriage has been annulled.” Then, out of the blue, an author of an August 8 Facebook post announces a controversial decision, supposedly made by the European Court of Human Rights.

“This court has established that there is no right to same-sex marriage. The 47 judges, from the 47 countries of the Council of Europe, who make up the plenary session of the Strasbourg Court, issued a sentence of great importance, which was and is surprisingly silenced by the media at the service of the ‘chuchalistas’ government and the left”.

Next, the author makes a series of considerations about the established, affirming that everything was based on “philosophical, scientific, natural, positive law and anthropological” considerations, based on article 12 of the European Convention on Human Rights. It is, however, a fake post.

The first important note to make on this matter is that the publication is not recent and does not contain credible information to support what is being defended. And the decision in question that happened is even older. Posts like the one being verified have been circulating on the internet since at least 2016.

But let’s get to the point. It dates from 2007 and is based on a decision of the French Supreme Court that annulled a marriage between two men in that country, being the first and only one that took place at that time in France. This happened, as the Portuguese and French newspapers write, because it was established that “marriage is [ou neste caso, era] the union of a man and a woman” and, as a consequence, Stéphane Chapin and Bertrand Charpentier saw their marriage interrupted.

Therefore, the marriage was annulled in 2007, mainly because people of the same sex still could not legally marry. The decision would not be approved until six years later. The case would even reach the ECHR and, in June 2016, that same court ended up analyzing it and decided, precisely, not to decide. That is, neither annulled nor confirmed the union. He left that decision in the hands of each State, according to media reports and now due to verifications such as the one carried out by the EFE agency.

It remains to say and reinforce that the ECHR did not have the competence to make such a decision on this matter, as the original publication reveals. “The ECHR, also called the Strasbourg Court, is competent to rule on individual or state complaints alleging violations of civil and political rights enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights,” reads a website about this type of body of Francisco Manuel Dos Santos Foundation. As can be seen in the Chapin and Charpentier case against France, the ECHR, at the time and in light of the existing legislation, left the decision-making to each State.

conclusion

It is not true that the European Court of Human Rights recently annulled a marriage between people of the same sixth. The case goes back to a decision – or no decision – of this same court on a marriage between two people of the same sex that was annulled in France – but in 2007. The ECHR affirmed that the States would have to decide freely, in light of the legislation at the time, what to do about whether or not to grant same-sex marriage.

Thus, according to the Observer classification, this content is:

In the Facebook classification system this content is:

FAKE: The main content claims are factually inaccurate. This option typically matches “false” or “mostly false” ratings on fact-checking websites.

NOTE: This content was curated by The Observer as part of a fact-checking partnership with Facebook.