Same-sex couples in Croatia secured a historic win last week after a court ruled that they have a right to adopt children.
The May 26 ruling from Croatia’s High Administrative Court ends a six-year legal battle fought by Mladen Kožić and Ivo Šegota, who were barred from adopting children in 2016 because they are a gay couple. The court said in its verdict that same-sex partners must have their adoption applications considered on the same footing as opposite-sex couples and be placed on a waiting lists if they are deemed suitable to adopt.
“Taking into account the position of the European Court of Human Rights, the Court states that a different treatment of persons in similar situations, based exclusively on their sexual orientation, represents a form of discrimination,” the court said.
Although same-sex couples in Croatia have been able to enter into civil unions since 2014, they have not enjoyed the same rights as straight, married couples. While a 2019 law expanded the pool of people who could foster children to single people and unmarried couples, the law said nothing of those in civil unions, tacitly excluding same-sex couples.
Kožić and Šegota challenged the law and began fostering a child in September 2020, becoming the first same-sex couple in Croatia to do so.
The couple only went public about the case after consulting with their social worker to ensure the children they were fostering wouldn’t be harmed as a result. Kožić and Šegota said that they wanted to show Croatia that same-sex couples are not “some kind of monsters, aliens imported from the West,” as they said in a statement to the LGBTQ+ publication PinkNews last year.
The couple have faced an uphill battle in trying to humanize Croatia’s LGBTQ+ community. A Pew Research Center poll published in 2016 found that 64 percent of Croatians opposed same-sex marriage, and in a World Values Survey released in 2020, 55 percent of Croatians felt straight people made better parents
When a lower court in Zagreb ruled last year that discrimination against same-sex couples seeking to adopt is illegal, 64 percent of Croatians opposed the decision. The Ministry of Demographics, Family, Youth and Social Policy appealed the ruling.
The High Administrative Court’s ruling is final, however, meaning that adoption is legal for all couples in Croatia.
With hate crimes on the rise, LGBTQ+ Croatians will continue to face social and political challenges even after this historic milestone. In 2020, two people threw a Molotov cocktail at a 50-year-old gay man, who reportedly suffered second-degree burns. The following year, protestors beat and spat on LGBTQ+ people at the Zagreb Pride parade, with some burning rainbow flags to express their opposition to equality.
But as LGBTQ+ Croatians look to the future, the couple said their case isn’t about them. They believe it’s about the well-being of children.
“It has become about us, politics, views, stigmas, but it’s not about us,” they told PinkNews last year. “It’s about those … children who deserve better care and, due to the poor work of institutions, are losing their future.”
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