An overnight success a decade in the making: Indirect discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation

On 30 June 2016, the European Court of Human Rights (hereafter ‘European Court’) decided that a binational same-sex couple was discriminated against because they were not allowed to marry; and at the same time, they were unable to live in Italy as a couple. For nearly one decade, human rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have submitted third-party interventions asking the European Court to recognize that unmarried same-sex couples should be treated differently from unmarried different sex couples when the first have no possibility of marrying. This article argues that the European Court has finally accepted what the NGOs have suggested since 2007, and that the decision in Taddeucci and McCall v. Italy signals a positive step forward from the ‘analogous situation’ doctrine towards recognizing indirect discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation for same-sex couples