Italy's Constitutional Court Just Extended Widow Pensions to Same-Sex Couples Married Abroad Before 2016

On Thursday, May 28, Italy’s Constitutional Court ruled that the state pension agency INPS cannot refuse a widow’s pension to the surviving partner of a same-sex couple married abroad before Italy’s 2016 civil unions law came into force. The decision partly strikes down a 1939 pension statute — passed under Mussolini — that INPS had been using to deny those payments. It is the third significant Constitutional Court ruling in eighteen months that expands rights for same-sex families inside the gaps left by Italy’s incomplete legal framework.

The case turned on one couple. A man married his partner in New York in 2013. His partner died in 2015, before Italy passed any law recognizing same-sex unions. He applied for INPS’s reversibility pension — the standard widow’s pension paid out to the surviving spouse — and was refused, on the ground that his marriage had been celebrated before Italian law recognized any same-sex relationship at all. He spent the next decade in court.

What the court actually said

The court did not declare same-sex marriage legal in Italy. It did not extend marriage equality. What it did was simpler and, in practical terms, more useful for the people it affects: it ruled that the pension system cannot use the date of an Italian recognition law as a cutoff to deny benefits to people whose marriages were lawful where they were performed.

The 1939 law — Royal Decree 636 — defined the surviving spouse eligible for a reversibility pension in terms that the court has now ruled cannot constitutionally exclude same-sex couples married abroad. The 2016 civil unions law (Legge Cirinnà) provided pension rights for civil partners going forward, but it left in legal limbo couples whose foreign marriages predated it. INPS treated those marriages as invisible. The Constitutional Court has now said that interpretation is unconstitutional under Articles 3 and 117 of the Constitution, which guarantee equality before the law and require compliance with European Convention obligations.

The ruling applies retroactively. Surviving partners of same-sex couples whose foreign marriages predate the 2016 law, and who were previously denied a pension on that basis, now have a route back to INPS to claim it. Italian rights organizations including Rete Lenford and Famiglie Arcobaleno expect dozens of cases to come forward.

A pattern the Meloni government did not pick

This is the third major Constitutional Court intervention in family rights in less than two years, and it forms a clear pattern: the court is filling in the protections that parliament and the Meloni government have refused to address.

In December 2025 the court ruled that the non-biological mother in a same-sex couple is entitled to mandatory parental leave on the same terms as the biological mother. In February 2026 the court extended recognition to children of same-sex couples in specific civil-status contexts. And now, in May 2026, it has reached back to undo a fascist-era pension restriction.

The Meloni government has spent its term going in the opposite direction. It restricted access to assisted reproductive technology for same-sex couples, stripped non-biological mothers from birth certificates in cities including Padua and Milan, and pushed a surrogacy ban that criminalizes Italians who pursue surrogacy abroad. The Constitutional Court has not directly struck down those measures, but in case after case it has narrowed the practical effect of the government’s policy direction by ruling on specific pieces of the underlying legal architecture.

This is the same pattern Italian rights organizations have documented for the last decade. Parliament refuses to pass marriage equality. Government policy rolls back at the margins. The Constitutional Court issues a steady series of decisions that, taken individually, look technical, and taken together amount to a slow extension of legal recognition that the legislature would not pass directly.

What it does not do

The ruling does not legalize same-sex marriage in Italy. It does not change civil unions law. It does not automatically grant any new marriage rights to couples married in Italy. It is narrow: it addresses a specific 1939 pension rule and a specific denial of a specific category of benefit.

It also does not resolve the broader question of how Italy treats foreign same-sex marriages. The 2025 Cupriak-Trojan ruling from the Court of Justice of the European Union held that EU member states must, within EU law, recognize same-sex marriages performed in other member states for the purpose of free movement and family rights. Italy has not yet brought its civil status code into line with that ruling. Rights organizations are now using the May 28 Constitutional Court decision as additional pressure for that broader alignment.

For the man who started this case eleven years ago, the practical result is a pension he should have received in 2015. For Italy’s same-sex couples married abroad before 2016, it is a precedent that the date of an Italian recognition law cannot be used to erase their marriage retroactively. And for the broader fight over LGBTQ+ family law in Italy, it is another piece of evidence that the court has decided it will not let parliament’s silence become the last word.

Italy goes into Pride season in late June with Rome Pride on June 20, Milan Pride on June 27, and roughly thirty other marches planned across the country, all of them still operating in the only Western European country without same-sex marriage. The Constitutional Court is, increasingly, the institution writing what marriage equality looks like there in practice.