Seven gay couples sued Romania to ECHR

ACCEPT Association and 14 people forming seven same-sex couples have sued the Romanian state to the ECHR, asking for the legal recognition of their families in Romania.

ACCEPT Association says in a press release that the complainants claim their right to private life is violated in Romania.

“These people could not access any legal form of recognition and protection of their families, which had serious consequences on their day-to-day life. Their partners are not recognised in hospital for instance as their kin, therefore they cannot stay next to them in case of hospitalization or in any cases of force majeure, they cannot take their partner’s corpse from the morgue in case of death or they cannot have the death certificate issued and to get the funeral aid. They cannot inherit one another through legal inheritance and they cannot benefit of their partner’s health insurance contract,” reads ACCEPT press release.

One of the families asking for the regulation of the civil partnership in Romania consists of Florin Buhuceanu and Victor Ciobotaru, the latter graduating the Adventist Theological Seminary.

“We are in the situation of exposing our private life in mass media. We don’t want to be in the limelight, but we have to prove to the Romanian legislator that there is a social need for the regulation of the civil partnership,” Buhuceanu said.

In his turn, Ciobotaru argues he is a faithful person and that “God has been very important” to him since childhood.

“I needed some time to reconcile my sexual orientation to my religion, as the Church rejects gay people. I learnt to accept and understand myself, by finding my happiness besides the person I love. I don’t need the church’s recognition for that, but I need the state’s recognition and protection, like any other citizens,” he stated.

ACCEPT Association has been asking for the regulation of the civil partnership for over 13 years, with eight draft laws being tabled and debated in Parliament on this topic since 2008, but none of them reached enough votes.

The relationship of a same sex pair falls under the concepts of “private life” and “family life”, the same as in the case of a heterosexual couple, said the Romanian Constitutional Court’s reasoning of the ruling it pronounced in the Coman-Hamilton case in September last year.