Jolanta and Alicja Sienkiewicz-Prochowicz received a Polish transcription of their marriage certificate last Friday, following an April court ruling.
However, their marital status was not updated in the Universal Electronic System for Registration of the Population (PESEL), Poland’s national population database.
“According to the PESEL register, we are single, and in practice this may prevent us from receiving benefits available to spouses,” Jolanta Sienkiewicz-Prochowicz told a news conference in Lublin on Wednesday.
The Regional Administrative Court in Lublin ordered the city’s Civil Registry Office to enter the couple’s 2023 Portuguese marriage certificate in Poland’s civil status register.
It overturned earlier refusals by the office and the Lublin governor.
The women said the court judgment had not been fully implemented. Their Polish marriage certificate contains a dash in the field for marital status.
“The head of the Civil Registry Office, when carrying out the transcription, is required to update marital status,” Sienkiewicz-Prochowicz said.
She accused the office of creating further legal confusion and eroding their trust in state institutions.
The couple plans to request that the discrepancy between the PESEL register and the civil status register be corrected. They will pursue the available appeals and further legal action if necessary.
“We are determined to obtain this change in the PESEL register, also because we know that another couple in Lublin is waiting behind us, and there will be more,” Sienkiewicz-Prochowicz said.
Lublin City Hall said the court ruling had been implemented in full because it required the marriage certificate to be entered in the civil status register.
It did not expressly order a change in PESEL, which is a separate database.
City spokeswoman Beata Pietryczuk said existing legislation lists gendered marital-status categories but does not provide corresponding forms for people in same-sex marriages. She said the matter required legislative action.
The city has asked the Lublin governor, who supervises municipal population records, whether the PESEL entry may be changed.
The governor’s office forwarded the question to the Ministry of the Interior and Administration, saying the governor was not authorized to issue a binding interpretation of national law.
The Lublin court based its decision on rulings by the Court of Justice of the European Union and Poland’s Supreme Administrative Court in a similar case involving two men married in Berlin.
The European Union court ruled that a member state must recognize a same-sex marriage legally concluded in another EU country, even when its domestic law does not provide for such marriages.
The Supreme Administrative Court subsequently ordered Warsaw officials to enter the German certificate in Poland’s civil status register.
Article 18 of Poland’s Constitution places marriage as a union between a woman and a man under state protection.
The Lublin court found that the provision did not create an absolute barrier to recording a same-sex marriage legally concluded elsewhere in the European Union.
It said the article must be considered alongside constitutional guarantees of equality, privacy, family life and protection from discrimination.
New document templates intended to allow the transcription of same-sex marriage certificates are due to take effect Aug. 23. They replace fields referring specifically to “the woman” and “the man” with fields that can be used for either sex.
Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal ruled in late July that part of the regulation introducing the templates was unconstitutional.
Government spokesman Adam Szłapka rejected the decision as invalid, arguing that the tribunal in its current form is affected by legal defects.
(rt)
Source: IAR, PAP