—Maria Kotsoni, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Princeton University
In 2024, Greece made headlines by legalizing equal marriage. This long-awaited legal reform expanded marital and family rights to same-sex couples, bringing them largely – but not fully – in alignment with the legal protections afforded to different-sex couples (Law 5089/2024). The legislative process was preceded by a heated political debate, marked by homophobic rhetoric and hate speech, which later crystallized into organized forms of anti-rights legal mobilization.
Greek-orthodox nationalist organizations challenged the marriage equality law before the supreme administrative court (Council of State) on grounds of its alleged unconstitutionality. More precisely, these organizations filed an application for annulment against the ministerial decision that set out how the details of spouses and parents would be recorded on civil registry documents to align civil-status documentation with the new law. The real target, however, was the equal marriage law underlying that decision and other acts implementing it.
Drawing on domestic sub-constitutional law, comparative constitutional examples, and the European and international legal acquis on equality and sexual citizenship, with judgment 392/2026 the Council of State rejected these claims and upheld the constitutionality of the marriage equality law. This judgment marks a significant moment in Greek constitutional interpretation regarding family, equality, and sexual citizenship. In what follows, I present this judgment and situate it within past efforts to advance equality in Greece and the broader landscape of right-wing legal mobilization.
The road to marriage equality
The road to marriage equality in Greece has been as bumpy as they come, marked by instances of progress and retreat. In order to understand the 2024 reform and its legal challenges, one needs to consider the wider context, especially in relation to certain legal episodes that have defined the struggle for equal rights in Greece .
On a June morning in 2008, on the island of Tilos, two same-sex couples were married for the first time in Greece. The mayor of Tilos conducted the civil marriage process, invoking the gender‑neutral wording of the Greek Civil Code. The marriage triggered legal challenges by a public prosecutor, who filed a civil lawsuit requesting the marriages to be recognized as null and void. After years of litigation, the Greek Supreme Civil and Criminal Court (Areios Pagos, decision n. 1428/2017) ruled that the marriages were invalid, holding that marriage under Greek law presupposed partners of different gender, while also invoking the alleged morals and values of the Greek society. While these events were unfolding, LGBTQIA+ activists were making efforts on the civil partnership front.
A key development in this regard involved challenges to the exclusion of same-sex couples from the framework for civil partnerships. In Vallianatos and Others v Greece, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) held that Greece had violated Articles 14 and 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) by limiting civil partnerships to opposite‑sex couples. The European Court found that excluding same‑sex couples from a legal framework designed to recognize stable relationships lacked objective and reasonable justification. The judgment prompted Greece to extend civil partnerships to same‑sex couples in 2015, without, however, regulating parental rights (Law 4356/2015). Greek-orthodox church actors and organizations, including archbishops, challenged the legal reform on civil partnerships, which the Council of State eventually upheld as constitutional in 2018 (decision n. 2003/2018).
Around the same time, in 2017, Greece introduced legal gender recognition legislation (Law 4491/2017). While this reform overall advanced the rights of transgender persons, it excluded married persons from accessing the protections of this law to prevent the possibility of equal marriage as an outcome.
Within the judicial sphere, during the years leading up to the 2024 reform, Greek courts were repeatedly confronted with cases concerning the recognition of same‑sex marriages lawfully concluded abroad. They also had to address the parental rights arising from these cases. With a few exceptions, courts broadly resisted full recognition by invoking public order, the assumed heterosexual nature of marriage under Greek law and the assumed values of the Greek society. This restrictive approach extended to parenthood, where courts were reluctant to recognize legal parental ties established abroad through same‑sex marriage or adoption, often prioritizing an outdated definition of the concept of family over the best interests of the child. Against this backdrop of judicial resistance, opposition to marriage equality did not remain confined to the courts’ interpretive practices but evolved into more coordinated forms of legal contestation by conservative actors.
Legal mobilization against equal marriage
Karolina Kocemba and Michał Stambulski define right-wing mobilization as
organized efforts, resources, and strategies employed by individuals, groups, or organizations with conservative or right-leaning ideologies to embody their values in positive law and its interpretation. In the process, such agents use legal tools, institutions, and concepts based on liberal and progressive political ideas like human rights or constitutional review. Often, this mobilization appeals to a vision of ‘real’ or ‘natural’ law, in which authority is combined with a homogeneous vision of the community, and which is contrasted with its corrupt and degenerate contemporary use by liberal elites.
Legal mobilization against equal marriage in Greece fits comfortably within this definition.
A coalition of organizations rooted in Greek-orthodox nationalism and committed to advocating so‑called “family values” challenged the marriage equality law before the Council of State. These organizations were the Association for the Protection of the Unborn Child “Agia Emmelia (Saint Emmelia)”, the non‑profit Estia Paterikon Meleton (Centre for Patristic Studies), and the nationalist association Enomeni Romiosini (‘United Greekness’).
Virulently opposing gender equality, reproductive rights, and LGBTQIA+ inclusion, these groups framed their legal arguments around claims that the equal marriage reform violated the provisions of the Constitution on the protection of marriage, family, and childhood. This reflects a broader pattern of anti‑rights mobilization in which constitutional litigation is used strategically to preserve a heteronormative and patriarchal conception of family law in the face of evolving equality norms at the domestic and European level.
At the heart of the challenge was the claim that Article 21 of the Constitution, which protects marriage and family, conceives of these institutions as inherently heterosexual in nature and intrinsically linked to the preservation and expansion of the Greek nation. The applicants argued that Article 21 implicitly presupposes a union between a man and a woman and that extending civil marriage to same‑sex couples amounts to an unconstitutional redefinition of marriage rather than a permissible legislative development.
The second line of argument focused on parental rights and adoption. The organizations maintained that the constitutional protection of childhood requires the presence of both a mother and a father and that same‑sex parenting allegedly deprives children of a “natural” family environment. According to this argument, allowing same‑sex couples to adopt would place children raised in same-sex households at a disadvantage compared to children raised by opposite‑sex parents, therefore violating the principle of equality and children’s rights.
Furthermore, these organizations also argued that international human rights law does not actually oblige states to grant marriage to same-sex couples, but rather to provide merely some form of legal recognition. They claimed that Greece had already met that standard through the 2015 civil partnership law, thus making the 2024 reform unnecessary. Citing the language employed by the ECHR regarding the right of “men and women” to marry and highlighting the original intent of the drafters of the Constitution, these organizations further contended that these legal sources support an exclusively heterosexual definition of marriage. Finally, they invoked “tradition” and the “good morals of the Greek people” as limits to the legislature.
As much as the litigation itself, its actors and purposes match the concept of right-wing mobilization, so too does the content of their arguments and their discourse recall what Gráinne de Búrca and Katharine G. Young have conceptualized as misappropriation of human rights by conservative actors.
The Council of State Judgment
In its judgment the Council of State confirmed that the key provisions of the law extending civil marriage to same-sex couples, together with the adoption consequences attached to marriage, are compatible with Articles 21(1) (protection of marriage/family/childhood) and 4(1) (equality) of the Greek Constitution.
The decision draws on four sets of legal sources: domestic (sub-)constitutional law (§§9-10); human rights law, with emphasis on the ECHR and its interpretation by the ECtHR (§§11-12); EU law, with a focus on the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (CFREU) and free movement (§14, a similar point was made recently for Poland); and finally, comparative constitutional developments in Europe and beyond, that show growing recognition of equal marriage, family and parental rights (§29).
The Council of State anchored the marriage equality reform in the core constitutional values of human dignity, the free development of one’s personality, and equality before the law, treating equal access to civil marriage as fully compatible with the Constitution. Its analysis then turned to marriage, family, and parenthood as evolving institutions. As the Council of State noted, contemporary social reality encompasses a plurality of family forms beyond the two-parent heterosexual household, including single-parent families and same-sex couples (regardless of whether they were married, in a civil partnership, or neither) raising children together, including children biologically related to one parent (§32). The Council of State also rejected claims that children raised by same-sex couples face a deficit in protection or discriminatory treatment in their upbringing. In short, it affirmed that constitutional protection of the family extends to diverse family forms in today’s society (§32).
The court also located the reform within a wider legal landscape, emphasizing that it aligns with human rights norms and a broader European convergence. In doing so, it relied substantially on the ECHR framework, especially the ECtHR’s interpretation of Article 8 in case law concerning same-sex parenting and adoption, like situations where the non-biological parent in a same-sex couple seeks legal recognition of the parental bond (§32).
The judgment feels like a U-turn compared to previous interpretative positions by Greek courts on equal access to marriage, including the recognition of marriage and parental rights established abroad. Seen against the broader arc of equality litigation and legislation, it also feels like a juridical closing of a circle on an aspect of sexual citizenship, which started more than ten years ago with the case of Vallianatos.
Conclusion
In the wider, global context of right-wing legal mobilization, the challenge to Greece’s marriage equality reform is recognizable: opposition shifts from politics to the courtroom, often targeting the implementation of rights through familiar frames of “traditional values”, “family”, “child protection”, and “nation”, inverting the spirit and scope of rights to their opposites so as to accommodate exclusionary and oppressive political visions. In this context, the Council of State’s judgment stands out for rejecting efforts to re‑inscribing exclusion into the architecture of civil status and family law, and for reaffirming that constitutional protection can accommodate plural family realities rather than a single historic template.
Suggested citation: Maria Kotsoni, Love on Trial: Greek Supreme Court Upholds Equal Marriage Amid Strategic Anti-Rights Litigation, Int’l J. Const. L. Blog, May 19, 2026, at: http://www.iconnectblog.com/love-on-trial-greek-supreme-court-upholds-equal-marriage-amid-strategic-anti-rights-litigation/