Civil unions, with sex change couple rights maintained pending marriage

In the event of an application for adjustment of civil status of sex attribution by one of the members of a civil partnership, if both intend to continue their relationship by transforming it into marriage, the rights acquired under the Cirinnà law are not extinguished in the period between the termination of the previous bond and the celebration of the marriage itself.
These are the conclusions reached by the Consulta, with sentence 66/2024, which declared the constitutional illegitimacy of Article 1, paragraph 26, of Law 76/2016 regulating civil unions, in the part where it establishes that the sentence of registry rectification of sex attribution determines the automatic dissolution of the civil union without providing, if the applicant for rectification and the other party to the union personally and jointly represent to the court, up to the hearing for the specification of the conclusions, the intention to enter into marriage, that the court shall order the suspension of the effects resulting from the dissolution of the bond until the celebration of the marriage and, in any case, not later than one hundred and eighty days from the final passage of the rectification judgment.

The case had been raised by the Court of Turin, in the course of a trial for sex rectification by one of the members of a civil union.
The judge who referred the case to the Constitutional Court had raised doubts on the constitutionality of the rule censured, not only with Article 2 but also with Article 3 of the Charter.
In the court's sights had ended up the unequal treatment with respect to the hypothesis, the mirror image, in which the path of gender transition is crossed by a couple originally heterosexual, and united in marriage.
A hypothesis in which the same Cirinnà law (Article 1, paragraph 27) provides that, 'where the spouses have personally and jointly manifested to the judge, during the judgment for sex rectification, the will to continue their relationship, giving rise to a civil union, the rectification of sex follows the automatic establishment of the civil union'. The Court ruled out the violation of Article 3 of the Constitution, emphasising that, although the bond resulting from the civil union produces effects very similar to those of marriage, they are still not entirely coincidental effects, and, in part, of reduced extension with respect to the conjugal bond, and included in the broader spectrum of rights and obligations originating from it. The objective heterogeneity of the situations compared, therefore, excludes the grounds for the doubt of contrast with Article 3 of the Charter.

The Constitutional Court has filled a gap in protection, similarly to what had occurred with sentence 170/2014.
Then the judge of laws had declared the constitutional illegitimacy of the law on gender rectification, overcoming the phenomenon of the so-called imposed divorce, i.e. the dissolution of marriage or the cessation of civil effects resulting from the transcription of the marriage celebrated with a religious rite as an effect of the sentence on gender rectification.
On that occasion, the Constitutional Court admonished the legislature to allow the parties who had expressed the will to do so not to automatically dissolve the marriage and "to maintain a legally regulated relationship with another form of registered cohabitation, which adequately protects the rights and obligations of the couple, the regulation of which remains at the discretion of the legislature".
An intervention that, by overcoming the automatism of the law on rectification, had opened the way to the possibility for spouses, now of the same sex, to protect the couple's primary rights, to have access to an institute that would guarantee them, similarly to what the rules on marriage do, reciprocal rights and obligations, without interruption and gaps in protection, an institute that was introduced with the 2016 law on civil unions.