The petition from the Polish Supreme Court is motivated by the demand of two citizens who got married in Berlin and who face the impossibility of having their union recognized by the administration of their country.
The Polish Supreme Administrative Court will ask the Court of Justice of the European Union to rule on the obligation to recognize marriages between people of the same sex celebrated in another Member State, the entity announced this Thursday.
Currently, the Same-sex marriage does not enjoy legal recognition in Polandsince article 18 of the Constitution establishes that “marriage, as a union between a man and a woman, family, motherhood and paternity must be especially protected by the State.”
However, many jurists support the interpretation that special protection for heterosexuals does not imply the illegalization of other types of marriages or legal unions.
The request of the Polish Supreme Court is motivated by the lawsuit of two citizens who got married in Berlin and who face the impossibility of the union being recognized by the administration of their country.
The request is based on EU laws on freedom of movement and residence, which oblige all European partners to recognize the legality of marriages that its citizens celebrated in another country of the bloc.
If the Administrative Court rules in favor of the applicants, there will be no appeal and the Polish Justice, as well as all state institutions, must automatically accept the validity of any homosexual marriage formalized in any country of the European Union.
The lawyer for the couple who initiated the process described the decision as a milestone and confessed that, “after dealing with similar cases for years, I was losing hope that something like this could happen.”
The Polish Higher Administrative Court is a body that exclusively decides cases in which the public administration has been involved, and is the only higher judicial instance in the country that has not been affected by the controversial judicial reform that the Government has undertaken since 2015. , supposedly because their activities do not foreseeably have political implications.
The legal strategy followed by the Polish couple was inspired by the precedent of a 2018 ruling by the European Court of Justice against Romania, whose government refused to grant a residence permit to the non-EU spouse of a Romanian citizen.
Source: Observadora
