An EU Court Adviser Says a Foreign Civil Partnership Isn't Enough to Stay in Romania

Before anything else, the thing to hold onto: what came out of Luxembourg on Thursday was not a judgment. It was an Advocate General’s opinion — a formal legal recommendation to the Court of Justice of the European Union from one of its eleven advisers, delivered months before the Court itself rules. The Court follows these opinions a good deal of the time, but not always, and headlines that describe Thursday’s development as a decision are getting ahead of the process. Nobody has lost a case yet.

With that said, the recommendation is a discouraging one. Advocate General Laila Medina told the Court that EU free-movement law does not require Romania to grant residence to a British woman on the basis of a civil partnership she entered into in Italy with her Romanian partner.

What the case is actually about

The referral, Case C-449/25, comes from Romania’s Court of Appeal in Oradea, which asked the CJEU how to interpret EU rules in a dispute involving a woman identified in the proceedings as FV and her partner, GH.

The two women formalised their relationship under Italian law in June 2024. They did so in Italy because Romania does not permit same-sex marriage and does not recognise same-sex partnerships — Italy was, in effect, the nearest place where the relationship could be given any legal form at all. According to Courthouse News, FV was living in Australia at the time and GH was in Romania, caring for her severely disabled mother. Neither woman had ever lived in Italy.

FV joined GH in Romania in January 2025 and applied the following month to extend her stay. In April, immigration officials ordered her to return to Britain, reasoning that the couple had no children together and that FV had not demonstrated residence rights elsewhere in the EU as the family member of a Romanian citizen.

Medina’s reasoning, and the “U-turn” problem

Medina’s opinion does not pretend the situation is neutral. She acknowledged that same-sex couples are in what EUobserver reported she described as “a structurally different and significantly worse position than opposite-sex couples.” She also accepted that the couple’s wish to live together is, in her word, understandable.

Her objection is structural. EU free-movement law protects family life that an EU citizen has genuinely built in another member state, so that citizens are not deterred from moving abroad by the fear that they cannot bring their families home afterwards. Lawyers call this the “U-turn” scenario: you move, you build a life, you return, and the rights come back with you. Medina’s position is that a trip taken solely to sign a document does not establish that life. “Although entering into a civil union is a legal act of undoubted personal significance,” she wrote, “it is not equivalent to having lived as a family in the host member state.” Citing earlier case law, she framed the treaty as concerned with protecting a family life that already exists, rather than favouring one that has not yet taken shape.

Extending free-movement protection to a brief visit, she warned, would encroach on national competence over family law and on decisions properly reserved to EU legislators.

Why this is not simply Coman reversed

It is worth being precise about how Thursday’s opinion sits alongside Coman, the 2018 judgment that remains the benchmark here.

In Case C-673/16, decided on 5 June 2018, the CJEU held that the word “spouse” in the EU’s free-movement directive is gender-neutral, and that Romania could not refuse residence to the American husband of a Romanian citizen simply because Romanian law does not recognise same-sex marriage. That ruling still stands.

But Adrian Coman had genuinely exercised free movement: he had lived and worked in Belgium, where the couple married, before seeking to return to Romania with his husband. That residence is precisely the element Medina says is missing in FV’s case. On her reading, Coman is not being narrowed so much as held to its facts — which is cold comfort to couples for whom crossing a border to sign a register is the only realistic option their own country leaves them.

Alina Tryfonidou of the University of Cyprus, an EU and family law specialist, told Courthouse News that the opinion is not wholly closed. Medina makes clear that failing to qualify as a “family member” under the residence directive does not end the inquiry, and Tryfonidou noted the plain inequality in Romania’s rules: opposite-sex partners can marry their way into family reunification, and same-sex partners cannot. That argument did not change Medina’s proposed outcome, but it is the kind of point that tends to resurface.

Medina also set out a fallback. If the Court disagrees with her on whether EU law applies at all, Romania would have to assess the couple’s relationship individually rather than dismiss it for non-recognition — and the requirements officials leaned on, a shared child or prior registration as a family member elsewhere in the EU, go beyond what the relevant EU rules demand.

The wider picture, and what happens next

Romania scores 18 percent on ILGA-Europe’s Rainbow Map, against an EU average of 42 — one of the lowest scores in the bloc, and a reminder that this dispute did not arise in a vacuum. The country has still not implemented a framework for recognising same-sex relationships despite repeated rulings against it in Strasbourg.

Set against that, the trajectory elsewhere is not uniformly bleak. EUobserver notes that in November 2025 the Court ruled that Poland must recognise same-sex marriages contracted in other member states in order to respect freedom of movement under Article 21(1) — a judgment under which, according to the Polish outlet RMF24, Poland now recognises 228 same-sex marriages performed abroad.

For now, the Court must deliver its own judgment before the Court of Appeal in Oradea can finally decide FV’s challenge, with no ordinary appeal available after that. That judgment is the one that will matter. Until it arrives, the honest summary is that one adviser has proposed an answer the Court is free to reject — and that the couple at the centre of it are still waiting.