Adoptions, the Constitutional Court opens the door to civilly united gay couples

It will be the Constitutional Court that will decide whether or not the prohibition for same-sex couples, civilly united, to have access to international adoption is  contrary to the Charter and the European Convention on Human Rights. Having doubts on the legitimacy of the impediment, posed by article 39-bis of the law ontransnational adoptions 184/1983, is the Court of Venice, called to decide on the application for adoption - of a child living in a orphanage abroad - made by a couple composed of two men in their forties, civilly united since 2019.

The ordinance relies on the arguments offered by the Consulta itself in its sentence 33 of 2025, in which the law court ruled that the provisions oninternational adoptions were unconstitutional insofar as they did not allow unmarried persons resident in Italy to adopt abandoned foreign children. On that occasion, the Court stated, as recalled in the order for reference, that the exclusion of individuals from adoption cannot turn "into a barrier capable of hindering the very right of the child to be received in a stable and harmonious environment, on closer inspection, such a requirement is also discernible outside the limited hypotheses envisaged by the legislature. Indeed, the effectiveness of affecting the protection of abandoned children is, in general, a risk that can also be attributed to the restriction of the pool of potential adoptive parents'. That was the starting point for the order of referral, calling for the enlargement of that group, from which persons of the same sex civilly united are excluded, with discrimination.

A limitation that is no longer sustainable, on pain of violation of the principle of equality "since while two de facto cohabitees," reads the ordinance (draftsman Lanfranco Maria Tenaglia), "whether homosexual or hetero-affective, and therefore of free civil status, could each apply for adoption as individuals, without having to make any sacrifices in their private lives, the same could not be done by civilly united couples". For the Venetian court, the infringement of national and supranational parameters is very evident if we consider that, as of today, couples united civilly could adoptby dissolving their civil union in order to proceed with two autonomous adoptions, first the one envisaged for singles by one partner and then the one in special cases by the other. The ordinance takes into account the couple's solidity in terms of affection, parental and social network, as well as economically.

Confident in a positive response from the Consulta the lawyers Eleonora Biondo and Valentina Pizzol, who assist the couple: "The measure has the merit of bringing, for the first time, the issue of access to international adoptions by civilly united couples to the Constitutional Court's scrutiny; the hope, they say, is now that the Constitutional Court will declare the unconstitutionality of the censured rule in order to obtain the recognition of a new right, more than deserving of protection, namely the right to access international adoption".