Vilnius District Court on Friday rejected request from a same-sex couple to order the registration of their partnership in the civil registry.
The court stated that in the absence of a law on partnership, there is no legal basis to grant the applicants’ request.
Even though the Constitutional Court has ruled that the concept of family is gender-neutral, the Vilnius court said it could not create new norms, which has to be done by the parliament.
“As can be seen from the above-mentioned official constitutional doctrine, the Constitutional Court [...] emphasises that the Seimas [parliament] is obliged to regulate, by laws and other legal acts, the legal relations of all types of family and the rights and obligations of family members,” the Vilnius court said in its ruling.
“The Constitutional Court does not impose the aforementioned obligation on the judiciary,” it said.
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According to the Vilnius court, creating new legal norms would be beyond the court’s competence and would “violate the principle of separation of powers enshrined in the constitution”.
The court examined the case on the registration of the civil partnership by written procedure.
This was one of three lawsuits brought in Lithuania by same-sex couples seeking to legally register their partnership or marriage concluded abroad.
Initiated by the Tolerant Youth Association, an NGO, the cases are aimed at furthering the rights of same-sex couples.
“For a long time, it has been misinterpreted that the Lithuanian Constitution prohibits same-sex marriage, but this is a myth that we will try to dispel in court. Especially since more than half of EU member countries have already legalised same-sex marriage,” Aivaras Žilvinskas, the lawyer leading the cases, said in a press release last week.
The ruling bloc has drafted and tabled a bill aimed at legally regulating relations between same-sex partners. The draft Law on Civil Union has been discussed by the parliamentary Committee on Legal Affairs, but has not been submitted to the full Seimas for consideration.
Currently, Lithuanian laws do not recognise civil partnership either of same-sex or opposite-sex couples. Several previous attempts to legalise civil partnerships fell through at an early stage of the parliamentary process.
Meanwhile, the Lithuanian constitution states that marriage is a union between a man and a woman.
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