Presidency urges parliament to resume partnership bill
Tuesday 20th October 2026 on 08:30 in
Lithuania
Lithuania’s presidential office has urged parliament to return to a bill regulating partnerships for both same-sex and different-sex couples, LRT reported Tuesday. President Gitanas Nausėda’s chief adviser on economic and social policy, Vaidas Augustinavičius, said the law should comply with the Constitution and reflect a societal consensus.
“We need to return to adopting a law that complies with the Constitution and reflects society’s consensus,” Augustinavičius told Žinių radijas. He added that people should not have to keep going to court to exercise their rights.
His comments followed a report by BNS that the Justice Ministry intends not to comply with a final court ruling ordering the state to register the partnership of two women in Vilnius. The ministry says there is no law setting out a registration procedure.
The impasse comes about a year and a half after Lithuania’s Constitutional Court opened the way for same-sex couples to have partnerships recognised through the courts. Courts have since recognised partnerships, but the ministry has declined to register them until parliament adopts legislation.
Asked whether the Justice Ministry must comply with the final ruling, Augustinavičius said the matter was a legal dispute he could not comment on further. “But a law is the solution to all these questions,” he said.
Last April, the Constitutional Court ruled that parliament had violated the Constitution by failing for 24 years to fulfil a Civil Code commitment to pass a separate law detailing partnership regulation. The court also said the framework must cover same-sex as well as different-sex couples.
After Justice Minister Rita Tamašunienė said she would not prepare a partnership bill, a group of Social Democrats, liberals and conservatives in parliament registered a gender-neutral partnership proposal last autumn through amendments to the Civil Code. The bill has not been placed on the agenda for parliament’s plenary sessions.
Previous efforts to legislate partnerships have also failed. In the previous parliamentary term, lawmakers considered a Civil Union Law and Civil Code amendments that would have introduced the concept of a “close relationship”, but neither was adopted.