By Jayne McCormack

Same-sex couples in Northern Ireland will soon be able to convert their civil partnership to a marriage, the government has said. The Northern Ireland Office (NIO) said the laws will come into force on 7 December.

It followed a six-week public consultation for what conversion rights couples should have in NI. The regulations will provide a three-year window to convert an existing civil partnership into a marriage. Fees will be waived during the first year, the government said.

Opposite-sex couples will also be able to convert an existing marriage into a civil partnership. Laws allowing same-sex marriages in Northern Ireland came into effect in January, but they did not extend to civil partnerships.

The first same-sex religious marriages were able to take place from September. The government laid the new legislation on civil partnerships in Parliament on Thursday, and said all converted relationships would be "backdated", so that they would be treated as having existed from the date the original relationship was formed. Read more via BBC