When the highest court made marriage equality possible

On 8 July 2019, marriage equality came into force in Ecuador. On that day the Constitutional Court's ruling was published in the official gazette, the Registro Oficial, and a judgment became law. It had been preceded by the narrowest of decisions: on 12 June 2019, the nine judges had found by five votes to four that the ban on marriage for same-sex couples violated the constitution. This made Ecuador the fifth country in South America to recognise same-sex marriage, after Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Colombia.

The road there was long and marked by stubborn resistance. As early as 2013, the activist Pamela Troya had gone to court after being refused permission to marry. The decisive factor was finally an advisory opinion of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 2017: it held that states must grant same-sex couples access to marriage and all the rights that follow from it. The court in Quito declared this interpretation binding and simply rewrote the relevant article of the Civil Code. From then on the definition read simply that marriage is a contract by which two persons join together to live together and support each other.

In the strongly Catholic country, the decision was fiercely contested. Conservative and church-affiliated groups were up in arms, and thousands demonstrated in Guayaquil. For the queer community, however, it was a historic moment. Diane Rodríguez, the country's first openly transgender member of parliament, spoke of a guiding star for many other human rights causes. The lawyer Christian Paula, who had advised several couples, summed it up like this: Ecuador was now fairer than it had been the day before and recognised that human rights must belong to everyone. On 18 July 2019, Michelle Avilés and Alexandra Chávez said "I do" in Guayaquil as the first same-sex couple in the country.