Italy court extends widow pension rights to same-sex couples married abroad

ROME, May 28 (Reuters) – Italy’s Constitutional Court said on Thursday that widow pension rights apply to same-sex couples who married abroad before civil partnerships were legalised in the country, in another win for its LGBTQ+ community. 

Italy’s 2016 law on civil unions grants same-sex couples some prerogatives normally associated with heterosexual marriages, including the right to inherit a widow’s pension in case of death.

However, welfare agency INPS refused a pension to a man who lost his partner in 2015, on account of their marriage having been celebrated in 2013, in New York, before the Italian law came into force.

The man appealed, prompting a lawsuit that went all the way to the Constitutional Court. Ruling in his favour, the court partly struck down a law from 1939, during Italy’s fascist era, which had been used to deny the payments. 

Denying a widow’s pension to the surviving partner of a same-sex couple would result “in an unjustified disparity in treatment compared to other categories of survivors’ pension recipients,” the court said in a statement. 

In a separate decision, an Italian court this month granted a 4-year-old child three legally recognised parents – two fathers and one mother – in a landmark ruling that angered conservative Catholics.

(Reporting by Alvise Armellini, editing by Rod Nickel)