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May 24, 2021

'Don't Need Marriage Certificate for Hospitals': Centre Pans 'Urgency' of Same-Sex Marriage Pleas

'Nobody is dying because they don't have marriage certificate,' the Solicitor General told the Delhi HC in response to senior advocate Menaka Guruswamy noting that lack of legal validity affected access to treatment.
Delhi high court. Photo: PTI

New Delhi: The Centre told the Delhi high court that an urgent hearing of pleas seeking recognition to same-sex marriages was not warranted under current conditions.

“You don’t need marriage certificate for hospitals, nobody is dying because they don’t have marriage certificate,” the Union government said, according to LiveLaw. The submission was made by Solicitor General Tushar Mehta.

A bench of Justices Rajiv Sahai Endlaw and Amit Bansal were assembled to hear the petitions.

Unhappy with the bench’s roster, the Centre also submitted a letter asking for adjournment and said that the court was hearing only cases that were “extremely urgent”.

The bench adjourned hearing to July 6, noting that the “Union of India may obtain clarification with respect to the roster,” according to a tweet by Bar and Bench.

On Solicitor General Mehta’s assertion that law officers were “struggling with COVID issues” and that “Right now as government, our focus is on real urgent issues,” senior advocate Saurabh Kirpal said in court that the (Union) government must be neutral when it comes to urgency, which is a subject that a court must decide.

When senior advocate Maneka Guruswamy told the court that admission in hospitals and treatment itself were proving hurdles without valid marriage certificates for same-sex couples, Solicitor General Mehta made his comment on not needing marriage certificates for hospitals.

Since the adjournment, a Twitter user pointed out that while hospitals do not ask for marriage certificates, they ask for the ‘next of kin’, which is difficult to establish without a legally valid certificate.

Responding to petitions seeking recognition of same-sex marriages under the Hindu Marriage Act, Special Marriage Act and the Foreign Marriage Act, the Centre in an affidavit in February had said marriage between individuals cannot be treated as a private affair, as they invoke “age-old customs, rituals, practices, cultural ethos and societal values” of India.

There is a “legitimate state interest” in limiting recognition of marriages to opposite-sex couples, the Centre had argued.

The Centre’s assertion came despite the Supreme Court verdict in Navtej Singh Johar vs Union of India case, which struck down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, that had until then criminalised homosexual behaviour.

In one of the petitions that the Delhi high court is currently hearing, a psychiatrist and a therapist had asked that the right to choice of partner be enforced by court. When the couple had approached a marriage officer of Kalkaji in southeast Delhi to get married last year, the officer had refused to solemnise their marriage under the Special Marriage Act, because they are a same-sex couple.

Another petition was filed by a United States-based couple, demanding registration of their marriage under the Foreign Marriage Act.

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