HRMI urged the Parliamentary Committee on Legal Affairs to reject draft constitutional amendments aiming to narrow down the definition of a family to heterosexual marriage.
In 2013, the amendments were initiated by 107 MPs who proposed to define a family as a marriage between a man and a woman or relations stemming from motherhood and parenthood.
In 2011, Constitutional court has held that family cannot stem from marriage only. More important than the form of family relations is their content, that is mutual responsibility, understanding, emotional attachment, and voluntary commitment, therefore family relations can be formed between unmarried people having no children, or single parents and their children, and so on.
European Court of Human Rights has also stated, already back in 1979, that family life cannot be restricted to marriage only and can encompass other de facto family relations. Since then the Court recognized as falling under the concept of family life relations between grandparents and their grandchildren, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles and their nephews and nieces, foster and adoptive parents and children.
HRMI urged the Committee to reject the draft law because it aims to discriminate families and deprive some of them of constitutional protection without any reasonable grounds or objective justification.