The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has ruled that the bans of the Moscow Pride marches and pickets in 2006, 2007 and 2008 violated Art. 11, 13 and 14 ECHR. The cases have been represented before the ECtHR by Russian ECSOL-member, Dmitri Bartenev.

The Tribunal interprets the 2004 amendments to the EU Staff Regulation in favour of a same-sex couple which choose Belgian registered partnership instead of civil marriage.

RKL-President Graupner represents ILGA-Europe (the European Region of the International Lesbian and Gay Organisation ILGA) in a landmark case before the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ). In Jürgen Römer vs. City of Hamburg (C-147/08) the Advocate General asks the Court to decide that same-sex couples must have access to employment benefits for married couples in all 27 member-states.

EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS RULES THAT SAME-SEX COUPLES ENJOY 'FAMILY LIFE', "JUST AS DIFFERENT-SEX COUPLES DO"

Today, in the case of Schalk & Kopf v. Austria, the European Court of Human Rights was not yet able to interpret Article 12 of the European Convention on Human Rights as requiring Council of Europe member states to allow same-sex couples to marry. However, the Court made it clear that this conclusion can change when more European countries than the current 7 (Belgium, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain and Sweden) have ended the exclusion of same-sex couples from legal marriage. In particular, the Court decided that the reference to "men and women" in Article 12 (which has been deleted from Article 9 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights) no longer means that "the right to marry enshrined in Article 12 must in all circumstances be limited to marriage between two persons of the opposite sex".