Information Note on the Court’s case-law 211
October 2017
Ratzenböck and Seydl v. Austria - 28475/12
Judgment 26.10.2017 [Section V]
Article 14
Discrimination
Different-sex couple denied access to registered partnership reserved exclusively for same-sex couples:no violation
Facts – The applicants, a different-sex couple, lodged an application to enter into a registered partnership under the Registered Partnership Act. Their application was refused on the basis that they did not meet the legal requirements; registered partnerships were exclusively reserved for same-sex couples. Their appeals were dismissed. Before the European Court the applicants complained that they had been discriminated against on the basis of their sex and sexual orientation because they had been denied access to a registered partnership.
Law – Article 14: The Court had not yet had an opportunity to examine the question of differences in treatment based on sex and sexual orientation relating to the exclusion from a legal institution for recognition of a relationship from the viewpoint of a different-sex couple. So far, the Court’s relevant case-law in such matters had originated from applications lodged by same-sex couples whose complaints concerned the lack of access to marriage and lack of alternative means of legal recognition. The Court’s examination of alleged discriminatory treatment in such matters had thus been conducted from the standpoint of a minority group whose access to legal recognition was still an area of evolving rights with no established consensus among the Council of Europe member States.
Different-sex couples were in principle in a relevantly similar or comparable position to same-sex couples as regards their general need for legal recognition and protection of their relationship. The exclusion of different-sex couples from registered partnerships had to be examined in the light of the overall legal framework governing the legal recognition of relationships. Registered partnerships had been introduced in Austria as an alternative to marriage in order to make available to same-sex couples, who remained excluded from marriage, a substantially similar institution for legal recognition. Thus, the Registered Partnership Act in fact counterbalanced the exclusion of same-sex couples in terms of access to legal recognition of their relationships which had existed before the Act entered into force. The institutions of marriage and registered partnerships were essentially complementary in Austrian law.
The applicants, as a different-sex couple, had access to marriage. That satisfied – contrary to same-sex couples before the enactment of the Registered Partnership Act – their principal need for legal recognition. They had not argued a more specific need. Their opposition to marriage had been based on their view that a registered partnership was a more modern and lighter institution. However, they had not claimed to have been specifically affected by any difference in law between those institutions. That being so, the applicants, being a different-sex couple to which the institution of marriage was open while being excluded from concluding a registered partnership, were not in a relevantly similar or comparable situation to same-sex couples who, under the domestic current legislation, had no right to marry and needed the registered partnership as an alternative means of providing legal recognition to their relationship.
Conclusion: no violation (five votes to two).
(See also Schalk and Kopf v. Austria, 30141/04, 24 June 2010, Information Note 131; and Fábián v. Hungary [GC], 78117/13, 5 September 2017, Information Note 210)
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This summary by the Registry does not bind the Court.
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