EDITORIAL: Gay marriage rights still lagging – 台北時報

After spending years in the courts battling for their right to marry, a Taiwanese-Macanese couple on Friday returned to the same Taipei district office that on Oct. 1, 2019, rejected their initial application to register their marriage.

Ting Tse-yan (丁則言) and Guzifer Leong (梁展輝) were finally able to tie the knot thanks to a May ruling by the Taipei High Administrative Court that overturned the Zhongzheng District (中正) Household Registration Office’s decision to reject their application based on a legal statute that defers to the “national laws of each party” when approving a union. Since same-sex marriage is illegal in Leong’s native Macau, the office turned them away.

As Ting and Leong are the first transnational couple out of hundreds left in legal limbo to receive a favorable verdict, the media have hailed their case as a “landmark” in the continuing fight for full marriage equality. However, it could just be a symbolic victory, as their plight is unlikely to set any precedent that could help their fellow litigants. The court’s decision was based solely on a provision in Macau’s Civil Code that bases legal jurisdiction over civil matters on a person’s place of “habitual residence.” Since Leong has resided in Taiwan since 2017, Taiwanese law governing same-sex marriage should take precedence, the court ruled.

The couple used their wedding day to call for full recognition of all same-sex marriages, as their case will be far from the last.

According to the Taiwan Alliance to Promote Civil Partnership Rights, 300 to 400 transnational couples are facing similar legal obstacles. If they are all to be decided individually in court, the lawsuits would drag on for years.

To avoid the financial and emotional hardship this would bring, not to mention the burden on the legal system, the government must amend the law to cast as wide a net as possible to ensure that all couples who want to get married can do so, regardless of their country of origin.

Draft amendments passed in January by the Judicial Yuan are a large stride in the right direction, but they are far from perfect. Although they would allow for many transnational marriages, including Ting and Leong’s, the amendments to the Act Governing the Choice of Law in Civil Matters Involving Foreign Elements (涉外民事法律適用法) would still require one member of the couple to be Taiwanese, would not apply to Chinese nationals and would not recognize marriages between foreigners registered abroad.

Another avenue could be through the Control Yuan, which is investigating the Ministry of the Interior and other agencies for negligence by discriminating based on country of origin, thanks to a petition filed by the alliance on May 24.

If not to uphold human rights, Taiwan’s status as the most LGBT-friendly nation in Asia and an attractive destination for foreign talent are also on the line.

The Rainbow Equality Platform in its statement celebrating Ting and Leong’s marriage raised another example of a German-Filipino couple to illustrate this point. The German spouse last year was sent by his company to work in Taiwan, but since same-sex marriage is not legal in the Philippines, their German-registered marriage is not recognized and his Filipino husband cannot be issued a spousal visa to join him. Even if the Judicial Yuan’s latest amendments were approved by the legislature, this couple would still have no recourse.

As proponents of marriage equality have been arguing from the beginning, the most elegant solution is the simplest one. The act should be amended to remove as many conditions as possible for same-sex marriages to free couples and the courts from decades of “landmark” cases.