You have full access to this open access chapter. This chapter focusses on the timing of all these changes. In a five periods analysis, it establishes whether major partnership rights were extended to same-sex couples at the time of the introduction of registered partnership, or before, or at the time of the opening up of marriage, or between those two moments, or after the opening up of marriage.
Thereby, and by calculating the same-sex legal recognition consensus among the countries surveyed for each of 26 selected rights, it finds nine typical sequences : Attitudes before rights; Rights before status; Bad-times rights before good-times rights; Responsibilities before benefits; Individual partner rights before couple rights; Partnership before marriage; Immigration rights among the first to be gained; Parenting rights among the last to be gained; Legal recognition before social legitimacy.
You have full access to this open access chapter, Download chapter PDF. Through the institute of marriage, the law of all European countries has been giving rights and responsibilities to different-sex couples. By excluding same-sex couples from marital status, it also excluded them from all those rights and responsibilities that β exclusively β came with being married. Over the last few decades an emerging trend in Europe and in some other parts of the world has been to reduce this exclusion.
On the one hand this is done by offering same-sex couples the opportunity to formalise their relationship as marriage or at least as registered partnership.
These developments have taken place primarily at national level, but, as we will see, international human rights law and the law of the European Union EU have also played a role. The LawsAndFamilies Database has documented major legal changes over a year period. The legal survey of this project has traced how in 21 European countries, same-sex and different-sex partners started and continued to receive some legal recognition.
