Date: 24 Oct 95 08:44:17 EDT
From: Kevin Moss <100324.1427@compuserve.com>

I agree with Per Ejeklint's quibble with Rex Wockner's account of Hungarian
marriages (if it is Per Ejeklint: Wockner has a way of de-attributing
information he publishes, reducing the person to "a Swedish reader..."). As I
understand it, the history of all this is as follows:

According to one of the interviewees in Laszlo Toth's book, "A
homoszexualitasrol" the old Communist family law recognized life partnership
(common-law marriage) and did not specify that the partners had to be of
different sexes. There were at least two cases involving same-sex partners under
this law: in one a partner inherited property after the other's death, in a
second a couple split after 25 years of life together and their joint property
was disputed in court. According to the informant, it was an oversight on the
part of the legal system, which could not even imagine that two life partners
could be of the same sex. To correct this oversight a new family law was enacted
in 1986 which specified that common law rights applied only to different sex
pairs. It was that law that was recently challenged in the constitutional court.

According to an acquaintance who may want to correct me, what happened in this
case was that the judge is an acquaintance of his university adviser, and over
lunch the judge ridiculed the claim of the gay couple as frivolous, but the
adviser set her straight, emphasizing the importance of the case. The court
rejected the new law.

This does not, however, mean that Hungary recognizes gay marriage "like other
countries," as Wockner implies: "Denmark, Norway and Sweden are the other
countries where gay couples have the same rights as married people, under
"registered partnership" laws that are commonly called "gay marriage."" Not
paradoxically at all, the court went out of its way in Hungary to state that it
would _not_ adopt registration of gay couples.

It is interesting to note that, contrary even to the initial Reuters post (8
March 1995), the move does not in a sense "make Hungary the first East European
nation to extend traditional rights to gay couples," since the rights were
already extended _before_ 1986. A similar situation exists in Slovenia, where
the old Communist law allowed inheritance by a same-sex partner, while the new
post-independence law does not (there too the new law has been challenged in the
constitutional court).

Kevin Moss
Budapest