The new civil partnership law for gay couples in the UK is marriage in almost all but name, according to English Law Lord Baroness Hale. Carol Coulter, Legal Affairs Correspondent, reports.
Speaking yesterday at a conference in Dublin organised jointly by the Working Group on Domestic Partnership, the Equality Authority, and Gay and Lesbian Equality Network, she said the only differences between the civil union and marriage related to certain provisions of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act. These provide that the husband or partner, where a child is born through sperm donation or surrogacy, is the legal father of the child. The new law also did not include certain provisions in English law that still discriminate between husband and wife.
The fact the new law gave gay couples a "status apart" which is analogous to marriage raised certain questions relating to conflict of law, she said. "What foreign unions should be regarded as equivalent? What about those foreign states which recognise both civil partnership and gay marriage?"
Both gay marriage and registered partnerships exist in Belgium and The Netherlands.
Beatriz Gimeno, of the Spanish gay rights organisation FELGT, said that in Spain all discrimination had been removed by treating gay and heterosexual citizens as equal in all law, including marriage law.
This included permitting international adoptions, despite the fact that this could close off adoption from certain countries to Spanish couples. "We will look for new countries for adoption, such as Brazil or South Africa," she said.
Europe had a "very strange" idea of Spain, she said, one of a country frozen in time 25 years ago when it was emerging from a dictatorship.
"We should remember that in 1931 Spain was the most socially advanced country in Europe, with a constitution that guaranteed rights held nowadays only by a handful of European countries. Then we lost a war that was won in Europe and we suffered 40 years of dictatorship."
Spain is now perhaps the most secular country in Europe, she said, where religion has little importance in people's everyday life. Recent surveys showed that the law permitting gay marriage had the support of 68 per cent of the population.
Speaking about the Canadian experience, former Supreme Court judge Claire L'Heureux Dubé said the rights now enjoyed by gays and lesbians in Canada were rooted in the Canadian constitution and its Charter of Rights, which entered into force in 1985.
This was developed by a number of key judgments from the courts. "Courts were listening to social change. Elected members of the legislatures, for the most part, resisted it," she said. "The Supreme Court of Canada elaborated a powerful concept of substantive equality that has made it possible to bring sexual orientation discrimination into the purview of the charter, eliminate most forms of discrimination on the basis of sexuality, and even open up civil marriage to same-sex couples in Canada."