The Road to Equality. Same-Sex Relationships Within the European Context: The Case of Italy

In Europe the same-sex couples are more and more considered social groups, which are legally sanctioned by either the ‘new’ contracts (such as registered partnerships, civil unions, same-sex pacts, Eingetragene Partnerschaft, etc.) or the same-sex marriage that, from the legal point of view, is nothing less than the opposite-sex wedlock. Other European States, though, continue to reserve the rights to marry and found a family for different-sex couples. Consequently, in Europe we are witnessing an anomalous situation, in which a same-sex couple may be legally recognised and protected in one State but not in another; what, in the context of both the European Union and the Council of Europe has given rise to a host of legal quandaries. That is exactly the sort of condition in which national and the supranational Courts have a legitimate role to play, also alimenting intensive judicial dialogue that, in turn, is bringing about the interlocked process of ‘interaction’ and ‘contextualization’. On the one hand, in relation to the rights to marry and found a family, there is an interaction between national laws, the EU’s law and the ECHR. On the other, after having long been monopolized by the influence of religious rules and – hence – exclusively reserved for heterosexual people, these rights are nowadays contextualized in both the light of changes in the perception of civil-status relationships and in virtue of the equality and non- discrimination principles. With this paper the author tried to demonstrate that the judicial process presently underway in Italy is an illustrative example of that.