ABSTRACT
On 22 May 2015, Ireland witnessed a historic moment. For the first time, a majority in a national referendum had voted in favor of same-sex marriage. 1 It was a massive victory, as the pro-same-sex marriage campaign received 62 per cent of the votes. This is a remarkable achievement in many ways and a testament to the increasing acceptance and tolerance of LGB people 2 across Europe 31. Later in the same year, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) issued a landmark judgment in Oliari and others v. Italy (2015), where Italy was found violating the right to privacy (article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights [ECHR]) for not providing formal recognition of same-sex relationships. The ECtHR had previously ruled that not providing civil unions to gays and lesbians when providing them to heterosexuals violated the convention ( Vallianatos and others v. Greece 2013), but in Oliari a violation of the ECHR for not providing any type of recognition of same-sex relationships irrespective of whether an option of civil unions existed for heterosexuals was found for the first time. These decisions and developments stand in stark contrast to (1) current anti-LGB developments in other parts of the world, (2) the continuous constitutional prohibition of same-sex marriage found in many Eastern European countries, and (3) the recent history of political homophobia in Europe 31, illustrated both in the prejudice with which sexual minorities were met within national settings and the ways in which homosexual demands were treated in the early jurisprudence of the ECtHR.
