Jakarta Globe – AFP, Deborah Cole, June 6, 2013
Berlin. Germany’s top court ruled Thursday that same-sex partners in civil unions are entitled to the generous tax benefits granted to married couples, in another landmark step for gay rights in Europe.
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| German Chancellor Angela Merkel. (AFP Photo) |
Berlin. Germany’s top court ruled Thursday that same-sex partners in civil unions are entitled to the generous tax benefits granted to married couples, in another landmark step for gay rights in Europe.
The decision
marks a bruising setback for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s ruling conservatives
less than four months ahead of a general election, as the opposition blasted
her party as out of touch.
The Federal
Constitutional Court in the southwestern city of Karlsruhe said denying gays
and lesbians in so-called registered partnerships tax breaks extended to
married people violated their civil rights.
The
scarlet-robed judges said their ruling applied retroactively to August 1, 2001,
the day on which Germany established civil unions for same-sex couples — a
status that falls short of marriage under the law.
The court
said that gay and lesbian couples must now be granted the same tax benefits as
heterosexual married couples because there were no “substantial grounds for
unequal treatment”.
It ordered
parliament to quickly pass appropriate legislation.
Married
couples who have a big difference in salary, or where one partner does not
work, benefit from having their incomes pooled in the calculation of their
individual tax bills.
Same-sex
couples had been denied such a tax break and the ruling will mean that the
German tax authorities will have to reimburse millions to gays and lesbians in
civil unions who overpaid over the past 12 years.
All parties
in the Bundestag lower house of parliament had expressed their support for such
a policy with the exception of Merkel’s conservative Christian Union bloc.
“What a joy
— another step toward equality,” Katrin Goering-Eckardt, a candidate for
chancellor from the opposition Greens, tweeted in reaction to the decision.
“And
another embarrassment for the Merkel government.”
Germany’s
openly gay foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle from the Free Democrats, who are
junior partners in Merkel’s government, also hailed the ruling.
“When
loving people take responsibility for each other, the state must not
discriminate against them,” he told news website Spiegel Online.
“It is time
that German tax law become as modern as our society.”
And the
Lesbian and Gay Association, a national rights group, said the ruling
represented another case in which the federal court had been forced to “tutor”
the government on constitutional rights.
Merkel said
in a newspaper interview in December that she did not favour putting gay
couples on the same tax footing as heterosexual ones because the constitution
“sees marriage as directly linked to the family and both are under special
protection of the state”.
The
chancellor has moved her party steadily toward the centre since taking power in
2005 but gay rights remains one of the few issues on which Merkel differs
sharply from the centre-left opposition.
The Social
Democrats have complained that Merkel has repeatedly co-opted their issues
during this year’s campaign, most recently with a proposal to cap home rent
increases.
Their chief
whip Thomas Oppermann said the court’s decision showed that Merkel’s government
had long discriminated against same-sex couples and had a “pre-modern view of
society”.
Family
affairs minister Kristina Schroeder of Merkel’s CDU party broke ranks, saying
that the ruling is “good and correct and clarifies something that is
self-evident to more and more people in Germany”.
Political
scientist Gero Neugebauer at Berlin’s Free University said the decision “did
not make the CDU look good.”
“It could
create the impression that it is not leading and lets other institutions take
decisions for it when there’s a conflict,” he told AFP.
Thursday’s
decision followed a ruling in February which found that gays in a civil
partnership should be allowed to adopt their partners’ adopted children.
Gay couples
are still forbidden from adopting children together in Germany.
Neighboring
France legalized same-sex marriage last month amid a bitter controversy over
the issue, making it the 14th country to do so and the seventh in the European
Union.
Nine US
states as well as the capital Washington have also granted gays the right to
marry.
Agence
France-Presse
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