HISTORY AND BACKGROUND

Until the late 1960s, Belgian law did not recognise or formalise any relationship between adults outside of the traditional institution of marriage.

BASIC STRUCTURES OF THE LAW ON ADULT RELATIONSHIPS

In the 1970s and the 1980s, courts gradually began to consider that de facto relationships could have some very limited legal effects. At the same time, unmarried cohabitation expanded rapidly. On the one hand, increasing numbers of opposite-sex couples did not marry while, on the other hand, same-sex couples became more visible but were unable to marry because the legal state of marriage was restricted to heterosexual couples.

In 1998, the Belgian legislature created a new minimalist status called legal cohabitation (cohabitation l e gale ; in the following used interchangeably with the term ‘registered partnership’) open to both heterosexual and homosexual couples (as well as to two adults not forming a couple). In 2003, it decided to go one step further by opening marriage to same-sex couples (but with a few fundamental differences between opposite-sex and same-sex marriage). Therefore, in Belgium both heterosexual and homosexual couples can choose between marriage and legal cohabitation (there are clear differences between the two, on which see below) or they can choose to remain de facto partners. The legal cohabitation regime is only ‘a little stronger than informal cohabitation’ and its legal consequences are ‘far less numerous than those of marriage’.

MOTIVES FOR THE INTRODUCTION OF REGISTERED PARTNERSHIPS

The law has its origins in a law proposal brought before the Belgian Parliament on 23 October 1995 by four representatives. At the very beginning of the legislative process, the proposal was about a ‘common life contract’ (contrat de vie commune) rather than ‘legal cohabitation’ (cohabitation l e gale). According to the authors of the proposal, a law was necessary for two main reasons: firstly, marriage was less attractive than it had been before; and secondly some social groups who could not marry (same-sex couples) or did not want to marry (opposite-sex couples) were asking for a legal framework for their relationship. The proposal emphasised that the common life contract differed radically from marriage and aimed only at creating an elementary guarantee for the partners.