Constitutional Court opens partnership to same-sex couples

On 17 April 2025, Gintaras Goda, president of the Lithuanian Constitutional Court, announced a ruling in Vilnius that queer couples in the country had long been waiting for. Partnership as provided for in the Civil Code was unconstitutional. The reason: it was only open to a man and a woman.

The background seems almost absurd. Parliament, the Seimas, had written partnership into the Civil Code twenty-four years earlier. But it was only to come into force with a separate law on registration. That law never came. So until then, Lithuania had no registered partnership at all, neither for same-sex nor for different-sex couples. A law on civil unions did pass two readings, but never came to a final vote for lack of a majority.

The proceedings had been initiated by the previous centre-right government. The court ruled in its favour on both points. Restricting partnership to a man and a woman violated human dignity, the protection of private life and the principle of equality. The judges called the legislature's decades of inaction unjustifiably long. The clause tying partnership to a separate law also fell.

The consequences are concrete. Until the Seimas regulates registration, couples can have their partnership recognised in court. The Constitutional Court did not, however, set parliament a deadline. For now, the route therefore runs through individual cases, which cost time, money and nerves.

Vladimir Simonko, head of the Lithuanian Gay League, saw the ruling as a chance to close a gap more than twenty years old. Lithuania was the only Baltic state that offered same-sex families neither marriage nor partnership. The ruling did not eliminate this backlog. But it turned it into a constitutional problem.